On Tuesday morning, President Biden slammed a leaked draft opinion suggesting the Supreme Court is on the cusp of overturning Roe v. Wade, calling the majority opinion “quite a radical decision.”
“It would mean that every other decision related to the notion of privacy is thrown into question,” Biden said, speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews. “It goes far beyond the concern of whether or not there’s a right to choose. It goes to other basic rights. The right to marry, the right to determine a whole range of things.”
Biden raised the possibility of a slippery slope where other decisions that were once considered settled law could soon be under threat, using a hypothetical in which a state such as Florida could try to ban same-sex marriage despite the Supreme Court’s prior decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. “It’s a fundamental shift in American jurisprudence,” he said.
The president’s comments follow a White House statement released earlier Tuesday that voiced support for writing Roe into federal law. “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,” Biden continued in the 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.”
The odds of such a law passing Congress are extremely low because it would require getting rid of the filibuster to overcome certain Republican opposition.
More on life after roe
- ERA Ratification Is Now Up to Trump’s Supreme Court
- The Unlikely Reason RFK Jr. Could Be Rejected by the Senate
- Project 2025’s Mastermind Is Obsessed With Contraception
