Biden isn’t the champion for choice we need right now

With abortion rights under attack, why should we trust a man who sided with conservatives on the issue for most of his career?

Justin Ward
5 min readMay 23, 2019
(Laurie Schaull / Creative Commons)

The right to choose is now facing the gravest threat seen in years. For decades, the immense difficulty of overturning Roe v. Wade meant that conservative activists had to be content with merely chipping away at access to abortion within their home states, but no more. Emboldened by the emergence of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court under Trump, red states are passing anti-choice legislation with the intent of provoking a challenge at the federal level.

So far, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah have passed laws banning or restricting abortion. Alabama’s are downright dystopian: They allow no exemption for rape or incest and subject women who miscarry to invasive questioning to determine if they had an abortion illegally.

When the stakes are this high, the candidate we select should give us no reason to doubt they will fight for a woman’s right to choose—Joe Biden gives us plenty.

Much of the bad press that Biden has gotten thus far has focused on his tendency to touch women inappropriately. His handsiness is waved…

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Justin Ward

Journalist and activist. Founder and co-chair of DivestSPD. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today. Follow on Twitter: @justwardoctrine, @DivestSPD