The Biden campaign is stepping up its abortion attacks on GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, seeking to tie the former president to a case in Texas where the state prevented a woman with a nonviable pregnancy from having an abortion.
The White House is following the broader Democratic playbook, as the party wants to keep abortion front and center for 2024 following a string of successes since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion last year.
Campaign officials believe the Texas case highlights a key point of the reelection campaign: that women's rights will be under attack from a Trump-led government.
“No woman should be forced to go to court or flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs,” President Biden said in a statement. “But that is exactly what happened in Texas thanks to Republican elected officials, and it is simply outrageous. This should never happen in America, period.”
Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, abortion has been a major headache for Republicans across the country, as candidates and elected officials have struggled to find a unified message or policy response.
Biden campaign officials are drawing a direct line between the Texas case and Trump, who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices that voted to end Roe.
“For folks who are still confused on who to blame, Donald Trump is on the airwaves right now bragging about his role in overturning Roe,” Biden-Harris 2024 Communications Director Michael Tyler told reporters Tuesday.
“Donald Trump can’t run away from his record and his abortion legacy.”
The Texas case centered around Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area. Cox was more than 20 weeks pregnant with a fetus that had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a chromosomal anomaly that leads to miscarriage, stillbirth or the death of the infant within hours, days or weeks after birth.
Doctors told her carrying the pregnancy to term would likely jeopardize her future fertility, and she and her husband said they wanted more children. But her doctors were afraid of prosecution or losing their medical licenses under the state’s near-total ban and refused to provide an abortion until the fetus died.
So Cox sued in what is believed to be the first attempt by an individual woman to challenge a state’s abortion ban.
A district court initially granted her a medical exemption, but within hours Attorney General Ken Paxton, a key Trump ally, threatened Cox’s doctor and the hospitals she practiced at with prosecution.
“The [temporary restraining order] will expire long before the statute of limitations for violating Texas’ abortion laws expires,” Paxton warned.
Paxton asked the state Supreme Court to step in. They paused the lower court's decision on Friday. On Monday, Cox left the state to obtain an abortion just hours before the Texas Supreme Court rejected her challenge to the state's ban. Her attorneys said that not every woman has the ability to leave the state to receive the procedure.
“Kate’s case has shown the world that abortion bans are dangerous for pregnant people, and exceptions don’t work,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has been representing Cox.
“She desperately wanted to be able to get care where she lives and recover at home surrounded by family. While Kate had the ability to leave the state, most people do not, and a situation like this could be a death sentence.”
Democrats in battleground states and the Biden campaign are highlighting Cox’s situation as a cautionary tale for voters, an example of the kinds of abortion bans they accuse Republicans of wanting to pass nationwide.
“Nobody should be forced to flee their home state to get the emergency health care they need. This was, tragically, a predictable outcome of our state’s extreme abortion ban,” said Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who is running to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“It’s time to codify abortion rights and ensure Texas women are able to get the reproductive health care they need without fear of criminalization or invasion of their privacy,” Allred said.
Republicans in Congress have been largely silent when asked about the case, and the Trump campaign hasn’t commented.
Biden campaign officials said they believe personal stories like Cox’s resonate. And they say the person most to blame for the chaos of women and health providers needing to navigate a national patchwork of abortion bans and unworkable medical exemptions is Trump.
“It's critical that we continue to lift up these stories and really remind women what's at stake in this election, and really the choice that they have before them,” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, said on a call with reporters.
Greer Donley, a law professor at the University Pittsburgh, said the implications of Cox’s case shows the state-by-state framework adopted in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision that ended Roe is unworkable.
“This whole anti-abortion enterprise where you can kind of categorize and identify the abortions that are quote, ‘good’ and make sure that they're still provided is not working, and it's actually impossible to make it work,” Donley said.
And while polls show Americans generally back some limits on abortion later in pregnancy, the Cox case demonstrates the reality on the ground is much messier than a simple campaign message.
“There's this obsession and this need to try to identify the types of abortions that are deemed to be therapeutic or good enough or medically indicated, medically necessary,” Donley said. “Pregnancy carries inherent medical risks.”
