Biden Claims Florida 15-week Abortion Ban is Extreme
I have stated numerous times that Democrats and Joe Biden were once again going to try to use abortion to energize their respective voter bases to the polls this November.
Joe Biden just made me look like a genius.
After the Florida Supreme Court upheld a 15-week abortion ban, Biden called the law “extreme,” setting the table for a showdown on abortion again in 2024.
Compromise
For one second, everyone set their personal feelings aside and look at this matter in terms of legislation and what could possibly be passed in a bipartisan way in Congress.
Pro-life advocates would like to have abortion completely banned and abortion advocates want no restrictions.
Neither of those is realistic in terms of having bipartisan legislation passed in Congress and signed by a sitting president.
If we want a federal law on this, it will have to be a compromise as well as including exceptions for abortion.
I have always believed the sweet spot for this would be somewhere between 15-22 weeks, with exceptions for women who are victims of incest, rape, or when their life would be in danger if they have the child.
Rather than start to approach this in a compromising fashion, Biden instead blasted the Florida legislation as extreme.
The 2022 law was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court, which stated that the plaintiff, Planned Parenthood, “cannot overcome the presumption of constitutionality and is unable to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the 15-week ban is unconstitutional.”
In this law, there are exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother’s life.
When I initially reported the ruling, I had stated that this could serve as a starting point for federal lawmakers to negotiate, but Biden clearly wants no part of that.
Biden responded to the ruling, “Yesterday’s extreme decision puts desperately needed medical care even further out of reach for millions of women in Florida and across the South.”
Biden added, “These extreme laws take away women’s freedom to make their own health care decisions and threaten physicians with jail time simply for providing the medical care that they were trained to provide.”
For me, the evidence of when the unborn child can feel pain should, at the very least, be the outside window for an abortion to take place.
While some studies say that viability starts as early as six weeks, others claim it is not until the 24th week that the fetus is viable.
For instance, the Cleveland Clinic posted a study that claims viability as early as 15 weeks, stating, “The fetus begins to make more purposeful movements, like sucking its thumb or smiling.”
WebMD has suggested the fetus can feel pain earlier than the 24 weeks that people had previously believed to be the case, posting, “There’s some evidence, though, that a fetus could feel pain earlier than 24 weeks — perhaps as early as the first trimester.”
If Congress cannot agree on this, the issue should be left up to the states and put on the ballot to allow the voters to decide on state guidelines.
That is what his happening in Florida, however, Republicans are now arguing that the ballot measure is vague and confusing.
As I have stated before, the GOP must figure a way to come to a compromise on this because if they don’t, Democrats will continue to use this as the number one tool in their election arsenal, which they did in 2020, 2022, and 2023.
And as the Biden campaign has made clear, this issue will be top of mind again in 2024, so Republicans cannot take the hard stand they took in previous elections. Otherwise, we are doomed to the same fate as previous elections, where the GOP gets handed crushing defeats when we were being promised a red wave or red tsunami.
