President Joe Biden sharply criticized the Supreme Court docket’s choice Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade and finish nationwide abortion rights in the USA, saying it put the nation on a “excessive and harmful path.”
“As we speak, the Supreme Court docket expressly took away a constitutional proper from the American folks that it had already acknowledged,” stated Biden, who chaired the Judiciary Committee as a senator from Delaware and is a longtime supporter of abortion rights. “It didn’t restrict it. They merely took it away. That’s by no means been accomplished to a proper so necessary to so many People.”
Biden famous the choice, written by Justice Samuel Alito, pointed to state legal guidelines criminalizing abortion from the 1800s.
“The court docket is actually taking America again 150 years,” he stated.
The ruling flies within the face of standard opinion and ends the five-decade-old precedent defending abortion rights. Abortion is now anticipated to turn out to be unlawful in roughly half of the 50 states.
“This fall, Roe is on the poll,” Biden stated. “Private freedoms are on the poll. The best to privateness, liberty, equality – they’re all on the poll.”
The president additionally pledged to guard ladies who journey to different states to acquire abortions, and stated he was directing the Division of Well being and Human Companies to make abortion capsules “can be found to the fullest extent potential.”
Biden additionally raised alarm about different rulings based mostly on a constitutional proper to privateness, together with ones defending homosexual marriage, homosexual intercourse and entry to contraception.