As dazed and confused as President Joe Biden seems most of the time these days on most issues, he’s been really dazed and confused about abortion ever since he landed in the Senate in 1973, during the final stage of the Nixon presidency.
In those days, he opposed the Roe v. Wade decision that struck down abortion laws in all 50 states. In 1981, he voted to permit the states to overturn it.
Today, no more. Biden is a hard-nosed advocate of the odious crime, as shown by his remarks after the unconscionable leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion that will overturn Roe.
Women Don’t Have the Right
In 1973, Biden was unequivocal about Roe, which SCOTUS delivered after hearing a case partly built on lies about fatalities after “back-alley abortions” and the rape of Norma McCorvey, the woman called Roe.
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far,” he told Frank Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelley for Washingtonian. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
A few years later, Biden voted yes on a bill, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, that would have allowed the states to overturn Roe, as The New York Times reported in 2019, when Biden was running for the Democratic nomination.
“I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background,” Biden said. His decision to back the bill, he said, was “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.”
Notably, Biden flipped like a silver dollar when the bill returned the next year. He voted against it.
“His back-and-forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career,” the Times observed:
What is clear from a review of Mr. Biden’s record in the Senate, his public statements as vice president and interviews about his comments in private meetings is that his position on abortion grew more liberal over his four decades in federal office.
“I’m prepared to accept that at the moment of conception there’s human life and being, but I’m not prepared to say that to other God-fearing, non-God-fearing people that have a different view,” he told the Catholic magazine America in 2015.
Mr. Biden has cast his evolution as a matter of wrestling with the teachings of his faith. But his shifting views also reflect a political calculation about the changing mores of his party in the 1980s and 1990s, when many moderate Democratic leaders, including Al Gore and Bill Clinton, altered their skeptical positions on abortion. Mr. Clinton, for one, sought to stake out a center-left position by saying abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
That line is, of course, nonsense. Democrats want abortions safe, legal, and available 24-7-365 on demand, and the more of them, the better. It is now, as some say, one of the party’s sacraments.
And so when an unscrupulous, presumably leftist staffer on the U.S. Supreme Court leaked the draft of an opinion that will overturn Roe, Biden said this:
If this decision holds, it’s really quite a radical decision.… I think the codification of Roe makes a lot of sense.
In other words, Biden wants the legalization of mass murder wrapped not in the diaphanous tissue of SCOTUS decisions that can be overturned, but instead in the mantle of law.
Biden Is Confused
Like most pro-abortion Catholic politicians, Biden doesn’t know what his church teaches about it.
Though in 2015 he claimed to believe “life begins at conception,” in 2008 he clearly didn’t know when life begins.
“Look, I know when it begins for me. It’s a personal and private issue,” he told NBC’s Tom Brokaw in an interview:
There is a debate in our church … that’s existed. Back in “Summa Theologica,” when Thomas Aquinas wrote “Summa Theologica,” he said there was no — it didn’t occur until quickening, 40 days after conception.
So, again, Biden was confused. The question to which he referred was never “when life begins,” but instead when an unborn child was sufficiently developed to receive a soul from God.
That matter was settled and the issue explained in his church’s Declaration on Procured Abortion:
In the course of history, the Fathers of the Church, her Pastors and her Doctors have taught the same doctrine — the various opinions on the infusion of the spiritual soul did not introduce any doubt about the illicitness of abortion.… [I]t was never denied at that time that procured abortion, even during the first days, was objectively grave fault. This condemnation was in fact unanimous. [Emphasis added].
And as the Catholic bishops reminded Biden after his remarks, “the Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact.”
Now, it appears, Biden’s confusion has cleared up.
H/T: New York Post
