The Stakes: What Trump and Biden have done so far on abortion — and what they want to do next

It’s been clear ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022 that abortion would be one of the key issues of the 2024 presidential campaign.

The GOP generally supports the court’s decision to scrap the constitutional right to abortion — a decision that dismantled 50 years of nationwide legal protection for the procedure and paved the way for individual states to curtail or ban it.

Democrats, in contrast, oppose the court’s decision and have called for making Roe v. Wade “the law of the land” again.

But where do President Biden and former President Donald Trump stand?

Abortion made headlines again on April 8 when Trump announced that he would leave it up to individual states to outlaw the procedure. In response, the Biden campaign accused Trump of “endorsing every single abortion ban in the states, including abortion bans with no exceptions.”

November’s election will be the first since 1892 to feature two presidents — one former, one current — competing as the major-party nominees. As a result, this year’s candidates already have extensive White House records to compare and contrast.

Here’s what Biden and Trump have done so far on abortion — and what they plan to do next.

➡️ Where they’re coming from

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Where Biden is coming from: A Catholic who says he has long been personally opposed to abortion, Biden spent most of his career in Washington trying to walk a tightrope on the issue.

"I'm a practicing Catholic; I'm not big on abortion,” Biden told supporters last year. "But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right."

In his 2007 book “Promises to Keep,” Biden described himself as “middle of the road” on the issue. And indeed, he has changed with his party over the years.

When Biden arrived in the Senate in 1973, he said he thought Roe v. Wade had been wrongly decided.

In 1981, he voted for a failed constitutional amendment that would have allowed states to overturn Roe. At the time, he called it “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.” The following year, Biden changed his mind and voted against the bill.

Although Biden came to see Roe as being “as close as we’re going to get as a society” to respecting religious beliefs while also “say[ing] there is a sliding scale relating to viability of a fetus,” as he put it in 2007, he continued to oppose federal funding for most abortions for decades.

It was only while running for president in 2019 that Biden reversed his position, vowing to repeal the measure if elected, known as the Hyde Amendment, that banned federal funding for the procedure through programs such as Medicaid.

Where Trump is coming from: Like Biden, Trump has said in the past that he favors abortion rights despite his personal discomfort with the procedure.

“I’m very pro-choice,” he said during a “Meet the Press” interview in October 1999. “I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject. But you still — I just believe in choice.”

But Trump changed his mind while considering a 2012 presidential run — and started to describe himself as “pro-life.”

“Pro-life people will find out that I will be very loyal to them, just as I am loyal to other people,” he told the New York Times. “I would be appointing judges that feel the way I feel.”

True to his word, Trump vowed during his 2016 presidential campaign to nominate Supreme Court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe, even going so far as to release his list of potential nominees — and to say that there would have to be “some form of punishment” for female patients if the procedure was outlawed (a statement his campaign quickly walked back).

🇺🇸 What they’ve done as president

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What Biden has done as president: In 2021, Biden made good on his pledge and introduced a budget that would have dropped the Hyde Amendment. Previously, it had been part of every federal spending bill enacted since 1976.

Soon after, Democrats in the House passed a similar budget without the Hyde Amendment — but the Senate put it back in, preserving the status quo.

Republicans narrowly flipped the House in 2022. Since then, Biden’s plan to repeal the Hyde Amendment has been stalled.

In June of the same year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down Roe. In response, the Biden Administration took a series of actions to expand access to abortion pills via telemedicine and at pharmacies; to defend emergency care for patients experiencing pregnancy loss and other pregnancy-related problems; to support patients’ ability to travel across state lines for abortions; and to safeguard the privacy of patients and providers.

Biden also suggested lifting the Senate filibuster in order to pass a new law that would restore nationwide abortion rights — but centrist Democrats blocked him.

The president did not sign onto left-wing calls to expand the Supreme Court with more liberal justices or offer reproductive services on federal lands.

What Trump did as president: Trump nominated three Supreme Court justices during his time in the White House: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

In 2017, Senate Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, lowering the threshold for confirmation from 60 votes to a simple majority of 51 votes.

As a result, all three of Trump’s nominees were confirmed with minimal bipartisan support.

And all three voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it and I'm proud to have done it," Trump boasted in January. He has also described himself as “the most pro-life president in American history.”

While in the Oval Office, Trump also backed a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy, saying it would “help to facilitate the culture of life to which our nation aspires,” and blocked organizations that provide abortion referrals — such as Planned Parenthood — from receiving federal family-planning money.

🗓 What they want to do next

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What Biden wants to do next: Biden has repeatedly emphasized the need to restore the “protections of Roe v. Wade in every state” by passing legislation in Congress — something that requires clear-cut Democratic majorities.

“You can do it,” Biden told supporters in January. “Give me a Democratic House of Representatives and give me a bigger … Democratic Senate, and we will pass a new law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade, and I will sign it immediately.”

Short of that, a second Biden term would continue the federal protections put in place during his first four years — which another president could easily overturn.

What Trump wants to do next: Nodding to a series of recent post-Roe election losses for Republicans in places where further abortion restrictions have been on the ballot, Trump has cautioned his party against going too far on the issue, criticizing some of the more restrictive state laws as a “terrible mistake” and blaming “the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans,” for GOP underperformance in the 2022 midterms.

So after considering a 15-week national abortion ban of his own, Trump announced in April that he would leave it up to individual states to make their own rules.

“Whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he said in a video.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, 14 states have effectively eliminated abortion; another seven have banned it at an earlier stage than the half-century status quo under Roe, which protected abortion rights until 22 or 23 weeks of pregnancy — the point of “viability” at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. Several other states are trying to further ban the procedure.

Only about half the states would continue the protections of Roe v. Wade under a second Trump term.

In addition, Trump allies and former Trump officials have been developing plans for executive actions — including criminalizing the shipment of abortion pills — that would allow him to outlaw abortion without passing any new legislation, according to the New York Times.

“We don’t need a federal ban [because] there’s a smorgasbord of options,” said Jonathan Mitchell, the legal force behind a 2021 Texas law that found a way to effectively ban abortion in the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. But “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”

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