President Biden will give a speech in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday focusing on reproductive rights, taking center stage on abortion about a week before the state’s six-week ban goes into effect.
Biden is expected to place the blame for the state’s abortion restrictions squarely on former President Trump, who repeatedly took credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Wade in June 2022.
Biden’s campaign said the president will “vigorously defend reproductive freedom and invoke Donald Trump’s abortion ban.”
The campaign is making abortion rights one of its main issues and aims to remind voters almost every day of Trump’s record on this issue.
Biden’s team is releasing ads featuring testimonials from women affected by state abortion bans, and Vice President Harris and other senior administration officials have been crisscrossing the country hammering Republicans and Trump on abortion restrictions.
Trump has sought to defuse Democratic arguments and has said repeatedly in recent weeks that it is up to states to determine abortion policy, rejecting explicit calls for a national ban.
The former president was spurred to action after the Florida Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that there is no right to abortion in the state, upholding the 15-week abortion ban in a ruling that automatically triggered a six-week ban on entry. effective in 30 days. later.
After the court’s abortion ruling, Biden’s campaign said it viewed Florida as “winnable” and intended to invest heavily in the state’s turnaround. Tuesday will be Biden’s first visit to Florida since the decision.
“Our advantage in the state is not just limited to abortion,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler told reporters on a conference call ahead of the speech.
“Republicans in the state attacked Social Security. They attacked Medicare. They made it easier for criminals to carry guns. They banned books, rewrote history to say that black people benefited from slavery, and attacked our most vulnerable communities. This all follows the Donald Trump model for MAGA extremism,” Tyler said.
Florida’s new law will be one of the most restrictive in the country, and supporters say it will effectively amount to an outright ban: six weeks of pregnancy is before many women know they are pregnant, and the state will still require two in-person visits with the abortion provider 24 hours apart.
The ban will effectively prevent access to abortion in the South, where neighboring states already enforce near-total abortion bans or severe restrictions.
But despite Trump’s desire to move forward, national and state Republicans have been on defense after getting exactly what they wanted when Roe was overturned. Polls show that a majority of voters oppose abortion bans, and Republicans have suffered a series of losses at the polls that have been blamed on abortion.
A day after Trump’s comments, GOP-appointed Arizona Supreme Court justices resurrected an 1864 law that made it a crime to perform an abortion or help someone obtain one. The law was passed before Arizona even became a state.
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