President Joe Biden’s fumbling withdrawal from engagement in a decades-long conflict will have disastrous consequences for the people he’s abandoned. His callousness toward so-called allies is stunning, and his betrayal will endanger the lives of millions of women. I’m not talking about Afghanistan. I’m talking about abortion.
As Tuesday turned into Wednesday, a half century of abortion rights disappeared in Texas, as the Supreme Court allowed a ban on almost all abortions to go into effect, without a single peep from President Biden or anybody in his administration.
Unlike his withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan, Biden’s abdication of responsibility in the war over American women’s bodily autonomy wasn’t announced in advance. There wasn’t a long draw-down. The military did not provide safe passage for women into the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and then hustle them to New Mexico in cargo planes. Quite the contrary.
Biden’s lack of action on this issue broke a promise he made to his voters. He campaigned on protecting Americans’ right to abortion access from state-level attacks. He has promised over and over that “Roe v. Wade is the law of the land,” and that as president, he would codify abortion rights at the federal level in order to protect them being further eroded at the state level. There was chatter that Biden would expand the Supreme Court in order to protect a conservative minority from stripping rights from women and shaping American law for the next 40 years. He didn’t do that.
Biden can’t say he didn’t see this coming. Texas’s six-week abortion ban was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott back in May. It was always going to go into effect on September 1st barring court interference. By that month, state legislatures had more than 500 bills designed to restrict abortion access. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that directly challenges Roe v. Wade and could end abortion rights for women across the country who aren’t lucky enough to live in a state that has codified abortion access for its citizens. Biden either didn’t notice any of this, somehow, or he didn’t care enough to do anything.
And President Biden isn’t the only entity here who deserves women’s ire.
The Supreme Court deserves it. All they had to do was uphold 50 years of precedent and block a law that blatantly thumbed its nose at precedent and women’s bodily autonomy. The law the Court allowed to go into effect bans abortions before a woman who is not giving herself regular pregnancy tests would even know she was pregnant (many doctors won’t even see a patient to confirm pregnancy at this point). The “life” that now takes legal precedence over hers is a spitball-sized armless, legless embryonic development with a tail. Anybody can report violations of this law--anonymously if they want--and anybody can personally sue people suspected of aiding women in obtaining abortions.
What really made this one hurt was how the Court did it-- in the middle of the night, silently, indifferently, an unelected body comprised of six men, five Catholics, and zero women in their child-bearing years allowed this to go into effect. Could there be a group of nine Americans more insulated from the consequences of their monstrous inaction?
But the Supreme Court never promised to protect women’s rights. Joe Biden did.
Gov. Abbott, a bumbling plague rat hiding his ineptitude behind slack-jawed cruelty, deserves some of the anger and blame, He didn’t come up with the law; the man can barely clip on his tie without knocking out the power grid. He didn’t pack the courts with religious zealots; credit for that goes to much cannier strategists who came before him. He’s just the kid who broke the pinata, after standing in line to take a whack at it for 40 years, promising over and over again that he would.
At least on this one thing, Abbott did what he said he was going to do. Biden did not.
It’s reasonable today that American women and pro-choice advocates would be angry with the chattering punditry class. Members of the political media have been so focused on pretending to care about Afghan people whose existence didn’t seem to matter to them until quite recently that they forgot to pretend to care about the women here in America.
But the political media has always been a bucket of crabs. Biden promised leadership that started from the top. Where is it?
If President Biden doesn’t act swiftly on abortion rights, his legacy will be that he ran for office on the labor of female organizers and voters, used women as props in slick campaign videos and photo ops, unleashed a few pretty strings of words into microphones, and then, when American women needed him most, abandoned them.
