Days after the Supreme Court gave Texas the green light to enforce the most draconian anti-abortion legislation in the country, President Joe Biden vowed to launch a “whole-of-government effort” to protect access to abortion.
But six months later, the lawmakers tasked with codifying abortion access still have no clue what that “whole-of-government” response is supposed to look like.
“Not a peep,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told The Daily Beast when asked if he’d heard anything about the “whole-of-government” approach.
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“They haven’t shared that with me,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA).
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), a staunch supporter of abortion rights, said that lawmakers are now in contact with the White House about how to protect abortion access—but that before Monday night’s bombshell leak, they hadn’t talked any specifics.
The bombshell leak in question came via Politico, which reported on the Supreme Court’s draft decision on Dobbs v. Women’s Health, authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the four most conservative justices on the court. In it, the majority finds that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” and rules that the decision “must be overruled.”
The administration has been asked by reporters for months to elaborate on how it plans to address the potential death of the landmark 1973 case, which affirmed the right to abortion across the United States. Those questions came with a new urgency after the Supreme Court declined to put the Texas law on hold, a decision—combined with oral arguments in the Dobbs case in which a clear majority of justices appeared to support striking down Roe—that shifted the overturning of guaranteed abortion rights from a longtime fear to a likely fact.
At the time, Biden said that the administration’s White House Gender Policy Council would coordinate alongside the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice “to see what steps the federal government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions,” and to examine “what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers.”
Biden on Tuesday reiterated his faith in the council—headed until recently by Dr. Jill Biden’s former chief of staff, Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón, and now helmed by former Time’s Up policy chief Jennifer Klein—saying in a statement that it was working with the White House Counsel’s office to prepare the response “to the continued attack on abortion and reproductive rights, under a variety of possible outcomes in the cases pending before the Supreme Court.”
But the council’s work has been conducted almost entirely in secret—a familiar theme with Biden and those working for him—with only the most nebulous hints as to its strategy for engaging in a fight that is now half a century old.
“At the moment, what we are doing is working very hard to explore all options, every option to protect reproductive health care,” Klein told Politico last week, “including access to abortion, and we’ll continue to do that.”
Some departments within the administration have made more concrete—and public—efforts to expand abortion access. Following the leak, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra highlighted the issuance of new rules for Title X expanding access to family planning services, a quarter-billion dollar grant to restore access to those services following the Trump administration’s rollback, and a $6.6 million investment to address reproductive health needs in places where local laws have restricted access to family planning services.
With the White House’s response to Roe’s overturning still under wraps, the administration has publicly put the onus on Congress to address the issue. Asked about preparations for a post-Roe America, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has sidestepped discussing specific plans, instead calling on Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act and “codify this fundamental right into law”—a plea that she has made in statements and briefings more than half a dozen times this year.
Biden, too, emphasized on Tuesday that “it will fall on our nation’s elected officials” to protect abortion access.
“We will need more pro-choice senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe,” Biden said, “which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
It’s not that simple for congressional Democrats, however.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Tuesday said that he will put a vote on the calendar for the WHPA, which passed the House last September. But with the filibuster still intact, the legislation is virtually guaranteed to fail, even if moderately pro-abortion-rights Republicans like Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) joined Democrats in supporting the measure.
Psaki said as much on Tuesday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that “there were not even enough votes, even if there was no filibuster,” to pass WHPA.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who has called himself “pro-life,” and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) made clear on Tuesday they have no intention of supporting changes to the filibuster—even to protect abortion access at the federal level.
There is also debate among some moderates over whether the WHPA is the best mechanism to codify Roe v. Wade, or whether Schumer should advance a more modest bill. Kaine told reporters that during Senate Democrats’ caucus lunch on Tuesday, they discussed “different options” for codifying abortion rights into law. If the WHPA goes to the floor, he expects there to be some amendments “at a minimum.”
“The simpler and more straightforward you make the bill, the more likely it is that you could get some Republican votes and unify Democrats, which I think is important,” he added.
But the politics of abortion, perhaps the most charged political issue in the country, are far from simple, as evidenced by Biden’s own apparent discomfort discussing the issue. A churchgoing Catholic who once described abortion as “wrong from the moment of conception,” the president has undergone a decades-long evolution on the issue, although his moving position on abortion has continued to get him in trouble. During the Democratic presidential primaries, Biden flip-flopped on the issue of government funding for abortions, and since he took office, Biden has only used the word “abortion” in public a single time.
That was on Tuesday.
