With Thursday night’s presidential debate looming, a key issue that affects women will be hot button topics as President Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off in the first debate of the current election cycle — reproductive rights.
Unlike debates past, Biden and Trump are kicking things off early in the election year. Debates of this kind usually don’t begin until September or October in an election year. We’ve also seen both of the one-time term presidents in office already so there is no more room for empty promises. Biden and Trump’s policies have largely divided America so the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Jonae Wartel, who’s leading Biden’s reelection in Georgia, noted to Katie Couric Media that the candidates’ differing policies will evident in tonight’s debate, and could define how voters swing.
“We haven’t had an opportunity to see them go head to head on key issues that American voters are most concerned about, such as the economy, reproductive freedom, climate, and the cost of healthcare so that contrast is on full display in a debate setting,” Wartel says.
There are many of us who have watched a Biden v.s. Trump race once before and feel disheartened to see history repeating itself, potentially with more egregious consequences than before. But, for young people who came of age during Biden’s term, like the teens SheKnows talked to in 2020 about the presidential debate, their vote feels more important than ever.
While there is no topic that voters should overlook, from rising childcare costs to immigration and US foreign policy, people who identify as women and anyone with female reproductive organs, will be looking for clarity on what will happen to reproductive healthcare in the next presidential term.
For decades, Trump has managed to evade maintaining a coherent stance on abortion rights, swaying between pro-choice and pro-life views.
In 2016, Trump fulfilled his election promise by nominating three of the five conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to overrule Roe v. Wade in 2022, during Biden’s first term.
Since Roe was overturned, at least 14 states have ceased nearly all abortion services and seven others have restricted access to abortion care. This has forced patients, in large numbers, to travel across state lines to access crucial care. That doesn’t even begin to cover the dangerous increase in doxxing those seeking abortion care or the ongoing fight to deny emergency abortion care to people with life-threatening pregnancies.
Trump’s stance has been vague, at best. In an April interview with Time magazine, he promised he would share his policy on the abortion medication mifepristone “probably over the next week.” We’re still waiting.
In early June, Trump told a right-wing Christian group that has called for abortion to be prosecuted as homicide that it would “make a comeback like just about no other group” if he is re-elected. The previous month, he told a Pittsburgh news station that he was open to restrictions on birth control before later backtracking in a post shared on Truth Social. In April, he said he believed individual states should decide their abortion laws.
“My view is, now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” Trump said in a video shared on Truth Social.
Biden, meanwhile, has been consistently supportive of abortion access throughout his political career and has called on Congress to codify protections available under Roe.
In January, he made it clear that reproductive healthcare would be a central topic in this year’s election in a statement criticizing Republicans who “continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions.” Biden warned: “Because of Republican elected officials, women’s health and lives are at risk.”
In an interview with POLITICO, Biden campaign co-chair and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer argued: “We cannot afford to have someone in the White House who is going to rip these rights away that we’ve been fighting so hard to protect.”
“We’ve got one candidate who has vowed to use every tool to protect a woman’s right to make her own decisions. And we have another who is thrilled that it was his appointees that shifted the court and ripped this right away from American women,” she noted.
Just this week, Vice President Kamala Harris restated the Biden administration’s commitment to improving reproductive healthcare, abortion access and contraception access. “Every person of whatever gender should understand that, if such a fundamental freedom such as the right to make decisions about your own body can be taken, be aware of what other freedoms may be at stake,” Harris said.
Yet still, Democrats have, at times, made some questionable choices in response to the attack on women’s rights. Biden may be called to answer questions about what actionable plan he will put in place to protect our already waning reproductive rights as women’s rights in general continue to deplete in a divided America.
Before you go, click here to see the biggest presidential scandals in US History.
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