President Joe Biden said Sunday he was considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources to promote abortion access, though the White House said that didn’t seem like a “great option.”
He also had a message for people angered by last month’s Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion and who have been demonstrating across the country: “Keep protesting. Keep voicing your opinion. This is extremely important.”
The president, in remarks to reporters during a bike stop near his family’s beach house in Delaware, said he lacked the power to force the dozen-plus states with strict abortion restrictions or outright bans to allow the procedure.
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“I don’t have the authority to say we’re going to reinstate Roe v. Wade as the law of the land,” he said, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a national right to abortion. Biden said Congress would need to codify that right, and to have a better chance in the future, voters would need to elect more lawmakers who support abortion access.
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Biden said his administration is trying to do “a lot of things to accommodate women’s rights” after the ruling, including considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources. Such a move has been pushed by advocates, but White House officials have questioned both its legality and effectiveness and noted that it will almost certainly face legal challenges.
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The president said he asked officials “to look at whether I have the authority to do this and what impact that would have.”
On Friday, Jen Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said it “doesn’t seem like a great option.”
“When we looked at the public health emergency, we learned a couple of things: One is that it doesn’t free up a lot of resources,” she told reporters. “It’s in the public health emergency fund and there’s very little money _ tens of thousands of dollars in it. So that didn’t seem like a great option. And it also doesn’t release a significant amount of legal authority. That’s why we haven’t taken this action yet.
© 2022 Associated Press
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