Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in Atlanta on Thursday night before an empty arena and two CNN moderators for what was billed as the first presidential debate of 2024. While a lackluster performance by Biden dominated headlines and sent Democrats’ tongues wagging about possibly replacing him at the head of the ticket, Biden embraced abortion-on-demand without limit and made a number of factually erroneous statements.
The debate turned to abortion early, as CNN’s Dana Bash asked Biden, “Do you support any legal limits on how late a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy?”
“I support Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters,” said Biden. He then seemed to say Roe v. Wade allowed the state to protect life in the third trimester, without endorsing any specific pro-life protection.
“Under Roe v. Wade, you have late-term abortion,” retorted President Trump. “We don’t think that’s a good thing. We think it’s a radical thing. We think the Democrats are the radicals, not the Republicans.”
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“They’re radical, because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth,” said Trump. Turning to Biden, he said, “He’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby,” returning to a memorable line from his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton.
“You’re lying,” insisted Biden, who slurred his words badly all night. “Roe v. Wade does not provide for that. That’s not the circumstance. Only woman’s life is in danger. She’s going to die. That’s the only circumstance which that can happen. But we are not for late-term abortion, period — period, period.”
However, Roe v. Wade merely allowed states to begin protecting life after the point of viability — originally set at 28 weeks, well into the third trimester. Its companion case — Doe v. Bolton, which was decided the same day — allowed abortion to protect the “health of the mother.” This included mental and emotional health, and sometimes financial circumstances, in effect allowing third-trimester abortions at any time.
Biden has endorsed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which goes far beyond the terms of Roe to strike down nearly every state and local pro-life law and ordinance. The Democratic Party platform endorses taxpayer-funded abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy.
Biden went on to defend the intellectual integrity of Roe v. Wade, which held that abortion, while not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was protected by the emanation of a penumbra thereof. “The vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe,” said Biden. “This idea that they were all against it is just ridiculous.”
In fact, far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg described Roe as “heavy-handed judicial intervention.” A former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the Roe decision, said, “Roe borders on the indefensible,” because “it has little connection to the constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent.”
In the same exchange, Biden said America needs abortion-on-demand, because “there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters.” He did not explain how a woman’s sister could impregnate her. Rape accounts for approximately 1% of all abortions, with incest another 1%. While the law rightly punishes rape harshly, no legal code in the world considered being conceived by rape a capital crime for which the baby deserves the death penalty.
Donald Trump also muddied the waters a bit while boasting of his role in returning the issue of abortion to the democratic process after 50 years of judicial diktats. “I put three great Supreme Court justices on the court, and they happened to vote in favor of killing Roe v. Wade and moving it back to the states,” he said of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom ruled for the 2022 Dobbs decision. Yet Trump seemed to see state sovereignty over the issue as the primary focus of the pro-life movement.
“Ronald Reagan wanted it brought back” to the states, said Trump. In fact, President Reagan supported federal legislation to protect life incrementally, as well as a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protecting all children from abortion. (Then-Senator Joe Biden voted in favor of the abortion-abolishing constitutional amendment in 1982.)
Trump also seemingly endorsed the Supreme Court’s recent decision not to challenge the FDA’s rushed and irregular approval of the abortion drug, mifepristone. “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it,” he said of FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Abortion pills account for approximately two-thirds of all abortions nationwide, and climbing.
Trump added that he supported “the exceptions” to allow abortion in the cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. “Some people don’t,” Trump acknowledged. “Follow your heart.”
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
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