WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the Biden administration’s leading voice in the battle over abortion rights, as the president has yet to forcefully weigh in on an issue that may offer Democrats a lifeline in November’s midterm elections.
Harris on Monday defended abortion access before a group of faith leaders in Los Angeles, continuing the steady emphasis she’s placed on the issue ever since Politico published a leaked draft opinion showing the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is prepared to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
“To support Roe v. Wade and all it stands for does not mean giving up your beliefs,” Harris said at the event. “It is simply about agreeing a woman should be able to make that decision with her faith leader, with her family, with her physician and that the government should not be making that decision for her.”
Biden, by contrast, has been less outspoken. He has yet to publicly meet with abortion rights groups or deliver a major speech on the expected end of Roe. When he has addressed the possibility the decision may be overturned, the president has set the issue in a legal context — warning that other freedoms rooted in the right to privacy may be at risk, such as same-sex marriage and access to contraception.
Polls indicate that a court decision overturning Roe is one of the few issues with the potential to shift the midterms from a referendum on Biden’s performance as president. Since the leak of the decision, support for abortion rights has grown among Americans. Biden’s approval rating, meanwhile, is stuck at just over 40%, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of polling.
The Supreme Court’s possible ruling overturning Roe is expected sometime this month, as the justices issue the final decisions of their term.
Biden’s measured discussion of the issue is deliberate. By highlighting the risk that the legal philosophies underpinning the Roe decision pose to those using contraception, LGBTQ Americans, and parents attempting to conceive through in vitro fertilization, White House aides hope that they can build a broad coalition of voters to turn out in November.
It’s a strategy intended to appeal to Americans who are uncomfortable explicitly discussing or voicing support for abortion rights – a group that appears to include the president. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has said the word “abortion” just twice in public as president, both times last month after the Roe decision was leaked, and in the context of discussing the legal ramifications.
Earlier in his political career, Biden was a critic of the Roe decision and voted for legislation outlawing late-term abortions and implementing restrictions on the use of federal Medicaid funds for the procedure.
The pitfall for Biden and other top administration officials is that they may appear insensitive or unresponsive to voters in the Democratic base who are worried about the acute and immediate risk that millions of American women will lose access to abortion.
“It would be a mistake to continue to talk about what might be coming down the pike, as opposed to what’s already here,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at the center-left group Third Way.
But Harris, who is outspoken about the effect of overturning Roe on women, may help the White House alleviate such concerns without having to put Biden on the spot.
After the Roe decision was leaked last month, Harris delivered an incendiary speech to EMILY’s List, a group that advocates for the election of women who support abortion rights, castigating Republicans and the justices they put on the court and exclaiming: “How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms.”
Biden, meanwhile, told reporters traveling with him that day that “if this decision holds, it’s really quite a radical decision.”
Harris’s remarks with the faith leaders on Monday focused less on the impact on abortion access than on downstream effects, like the threat to privacy rights.
“I do believe that when we look at the challenge that we will face when that decision comes down, a part of it will be that it will directly if not indirectly impact other privacy rights, including the right to have access to contraception, and the right to marry the person you love,” she said.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended Biden’s response to the potential repeal of Roe, saying last Wednesday that it is “an important issue for the president.”
“It’s not like we didn’t take this seriously and we don’t continue to take this seriously,” she told reporters at a press briefing.
Asked if Biden would personally stage meetings or speeches on abortion rights, Jean-Pierre said she had nothing to announce.
The administration’s strategy is a tacit acknowledgment that American attitudes on abortion are far less definitive than on other hot-button social issues.
Polling — including surveys by Gallup and the Washington Post taken after the leaked Supreme Court draft — shows that a majority of Americans consistently say they support the Roe decision and abortion rights in most cases.
But respondents will routinely espouse contradictory statements about what restrictions they support depending on how questions are worded – all while insisting they feel strongly about their position on abortion. And conversations about abortion rights often dovetail with other discussions of gender, race, and class that can motivate – and alienate – voters.
Some 58% of respondents in a May survey by Gallup said the Supreme Court should not overturn the Roe decision. That significantly trails the 70% of Americans who say they support gay marriage rights and the 90% who say birth control is morally acceptable, according to Gallup polls taken earlier this year.
Erickson said she expects Biden and the White House to sharpen their arguments and hone in on the threat to abortion rights once the high court issues its ruling, which could prompt a large number of Republican-led states to pass stricter abortion laws or see old bans on the books that were invalidated by Roe take effect.
“Democrats have been skittish, nuanced, a bit divided” in the past on the issue of abortion rights, Erickson said. “But once the playing field changes so dramatically, we aren’t going to have to be nuanced anymore.”
