Joe Biden Urges Congress to Protect America’s Abortion Right

The president of the USA, Joe Biden, wants Congress to act to protect abortion rights in the country, especially in light of signs that the conservative majority in the US Supreme Court plans to limit it.

This was stated this Thursday by the spokeswoman for Biden and from the White House, Jen Psaki, a day after conservative Supreme Court justices hinted at a hearing that they lean in favor of restricting the circumstances in which abortion is legal in the United States.

“The president is committed to working with Congress to protect the constitutional right to safe and legal abortion,” Psaki said at his daily press conference.

Specifically, the president wants the Senate to pass a bill that would guarantee the right to abortion throughout the United States for any reason during the first 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy, and in case of danger to the mother from that point on. of gestation.

The US House of Representatives, with a Democratic majority, already validated that measure in September, known as the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), but that text faces notable opposition in the Senate, where Biden’s party only controls half of the seats.

Currently, abortion is legal in the United States for any reason until the time of “viability” of the fetus outside the womb, around 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Those are the parameters that marked the decision of the Supreme Court that legalized abortion throughout the country in 1973, called “Roe versus Wade” and that for a decade has been one of the main workhorses of the leaders of a score of conservative states .

At the hearing on Wednesday, six of the nine Supreme Court justices, those with a conservative tendency, gave indications that they are in favor of supporting a Mississippi law that would prohibit abortion from 15 weeks in that state, where only remains a clinic that offers this service.

What is not yet clear is whether the Supreme Court’s decision, which will probably not arrive until June 2022, will mean the end of the 1973 precedent, something that would allow each state to regulate abortion at will and that would cause the conservative half of the country would surely prohibit this practice.

It is also possible that the magistrates decide to shorten the limit in which abortion is legal in the country, and go from the current 24 weeks of gestation to, for example, the 15 proposed in the Mississippi law.

Psaki stressed this Thursday that Biden opposes the Mississippi legislation because it “drastically violates the constitutional rights of women to safe and legal abortion,” and that is why his government testified before the Supreme Court on Wednesday to urge him to overturn that law, that it has not yet entered into force.