President Joe Biden released a statement in response to a Politico report which appears to include a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The report came out Monday night.
“If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” President Biden said in the Tuesday statement. “At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
From the statement, it appears the Biden administration is looking to add abortion rights to a list of policy goals despite struggling to pass major legislation since assuming office. Codifying Roe v. Wade would likely require a change to the Senate filibuster rules, which Biden has already failed to do to pass voting rights legislation.
The leaked opinion concerns the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. The court heard arguments in the case last December. In the leaked majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court describes Roe v. Wade as “egregiously wrong from the start.”
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and [Casey v. Planned Parenthood] now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito wrote. “That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’”
The official ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is expected to come in late June or early July. When that happens, if the final opinion does not stray from the draft opinion, the current legislative push to restrict abortion in several Republican-led states is expected to grow to cover roughly half the country.
