President Joe Biden has not ruled out declaring a public health emergency over abortion access, he said Saturday, bucking other administration officials who had earlier decided against it.
“That’s something I’ve asked the … medical people in the administration to look at, whether … I have the authority to do that and what impact that would have,” Biden said when asked about the emergency declaration. That suggests Biden himself is aware of the political necessity of bold action, even as some of his spokespeople are whiffing on it.
“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield sniffed in statement to The Washington Post over the weekend. “It’s to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now, just as he assembled such a coalition to win during the 2020 campaign.”
Right. The millions of people who have been fighting for abortion access for decades and the majority of “mainstream” Democrats who support abortion rights are now “some activists” for some in the White House. It’s a good thing Biden doesn’t seem to see us that way.
Delivering help to those in danger over lack of abortion access is exactly what a public health emergency declaration would do. One of the reasons it was supposedly ruled out by administration officials is that it would kick off a legal battle. But that’s a fight the administration needs to take on to show the huge majority of abortion supporters in the country that he will take one of the actions that is in his authority. He needs to fight.
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Democratic lawmakers and abortion advocates have been pushing the emergency declaration for weeks. The morning the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs overturning federal abortion rights, the Congressional Black Caucus and the House Pro-Choice caucus requested the move. “The fundamental right to control your body and future has been ripped away from American women,” Assistant Speaker of the House Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-MA) said at the end of June. “Declaring an emergency is an immediate step to help patients access the care they need.”
Abortion clinics operating in states where the procedure is still legal “are doing everything they can,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said for their own residents and for people traveling to obtain abortions. “But they are severely resource constrained in terms of the providers that they have, in terms of the physical facilities that they have, in terms of the financial resources they need to try to expand access to care, which they desperately want to do.” The emergency declaration “would be another way for the full legal authority of the federal government to be brought into play as we try to protect women’s health,” Smith said.
The Hyde Amendment would prevent any federal funding to pay for abortions in an emergency declaration, but the fund could be used to help pay travel costs. It could also allow medical personnel to practice outside of the states they are licensed in, enable registered nurses to perform abortions, and allow people in other states’ Medicaid programs to be treated. Medical personnel who can’t provide abortions in their own states now could staff up clinics where it’s legal under an emergency declaration.
The most compelling argument against doing it is that there’s little funding left in the emergency public health coffers, depleted by COVID-19. There likely isn’t the money to help people travel, but that part of the equation can be picked up by private donors. The funding isn’t nearly as important as the ability to allow abortion providers to help take care of the demand where those abortion-seekers are traveling to.
The least compelling argument against doing it is coming from the same cautious voices ready to surrender to the Supreme Court. After Biden’s bold-ish statement over the weekend, they’re back in gear, with this story in Politico expressing a disturbing degree of self-defeatism. “[T]he legal team vetting his options has found itself preoccupied by a single pressing concern: That any action they could take would simply be struck down by the very court that put them in this place.”
That is not a compelling argument. That’s surrender. It’s also not a good look at all, undermining the commander in chief just after he finally got people back on his side in this fight. It’s just not smart. The public is fed up with the Supreme Court, with its favorability plummeting by the week in polling by Navigator Research.
Taking on the extremely unpopular court in a fight to protect extremely popular abortion rights just makes sense in every formulation, but especially as the midterms heat up.
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