It has been two weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and President Biden is set to sign an executive order on abortion access today, after Democrats have pressured him for the past two weeks.
The Biden administration said the executive order would be “safeguarding access to reproductive health care services, including abortion and contraception,” Axios reported.
This executive order is expected to formalize instructions to the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services to push back against limits on women’s ability to access federally approved abortion medication or traveling out of state to an abortion clinic, the Associated Press reported.
Biden’s order will also direct agencies to educate medical providers and insurers about how and when they are required to share private patient information with authorities, Fox News reported.
The president is also expected to ask the Federal Trade Commission to take steps to protect the privacy of those who may be looking online for information about abortion and reproductive care.
The White House has already been clear in its support of abortion.
Vice President Kamala Harris is set to meet with state legislators from Indiana, Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska and Montana who are said to be “fighting on the frontlines to protect reproductive rights.”
Biden himself has spoken about his ability to protect abortion access in states where officials may be planning to restrict or ban abortion.
He has stressed that Congress also has the ability to codify abortion rights and that the issue did not just end with the court decision.
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“Ultimately, Congress is going to have to act to codify Roe into federal law,” Biden said last week.
He also tweeted that, “If extremist governors try to block a woman from traveling from a state that prohibits her from seeking the medical help she needs to a state that provides that care, we will act to protect her bedrock rights.”
If extremist governors try to block a woman from traveling from a state that prohibits her from seeking the medical help she needs to a state that provides that care, we will act to protect her bedrock rights.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 7, 2022
However, many on the left have been criticizing the president for not doing more after the court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Before the Supreme Court even overturned Roe v. Wade, a group of Democratic senators including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Matt Murray of Washington, urged Biden to protect abortion via an executive order, Axios reported.
“[A]s President of the United States, you have the unique power to marshal the resources of the entire federal government to respond,” the senators wrote in a letter to the president.
“[A]bortion access is under attack in the United States and already completely eliminated in swaths of the country,” the letter added.
The urge for Biden to do something about abortion intensified, as many states also had trigger laws ready that banned or severely limited abortions immediately following the court’s ruling.
These trigger laws meant that directly following the court’s overturn of Roe, 13 states had laws to ban abortion, Axios reported.
But now Biden’s executive order will be trying to counteract those laws and many others that limit abortion.
