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Joe Biden endorsed by pro-abortion NARAL

“NARAL Pro-Choice America and our 2.5 million members are committed to powering Vice President Biden to victory this November and working with his administration to protect and expand access to abortion care and birth control,” said a statement from NARAL President Ilyse Hogue.

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks Oct. 26, 2019, at the Second Step Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C. (CNS photo/Sam Wolfe, Reuters)

CNA Staff, Jul 29, 2020 / 12:30 pm (CNA).- The abortion-rights group NARAL has  endorsed Joe Biden for president, just over a year after the group issued a scathing statement demanding he reverse his support for the Hyde Amendment.

“NARAL Pro-Choice America and our 2.5 million members are committed to powering Vice President Biden to victory this November and working with his administration to protect and expand access to abortion care and birth control,” said a statement from NARAL President Ilyse Hogue announcing the endorsement on July 27.

A Biden presidency would “stand for freedom over Donald Trump’s desire to control women,” and would “put a stop to Trump’s dangerous anti-choice political agenda when so much hangs in the balance,” she said.

As recently as 2003, while still serving in the U.S. Senate, Biden received a 36% rating from NARAL. In 2007, his last full year as a senator prior to being elected vice president, Biden received a 75% rating from NARAL, although he had received perfect 100% ratings in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Those years featured one roll-call vote on abortion legislation.

In June 2019, NARAL released a statement criticizing Biden for his support of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of taxpayer funding for abortions. Hogue said at that time that there was “no political or ideological excuse for Joe Biden’s support for the Hyde Amendment, which translates into discrimination against poor women and women of color plain and simple.”

Hogue added that Biden’s support of Hyde “further endangers women and families,” and that abortion protections are one of the Democratic Party’s “core values.”

Shortly after NARAL’s statement, Biden flip-flopped on his decades-long support for the Hyde Amendment and announced he was opposed to the policy.

NARAL’s endorsement of Biden is another milestone on the Democratic candidate’s journey to full support for abortion.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Biden stated that he believed the court went “too far” in its ruling making abortion legal.

In the following decades, Biden’s pro-life votes and opinions continued. He lent his name to the “Biden Amendment,” which banned the use of federal funds for biomedical research involving abortion or involuntary sterilization in 1981. In 1984, Biden voted for the Mexico City Policy, which bans the use of federal aid money to pay for abortions.

Biden repeatedly voted in favor of the Hyde Amendment, and in 1995 and 1997 he voted to ban the late-term abortion technique partial-birth abortion.

In 2003, he broke with the Democratic members of the Senate and voted again for a ban on partial-birth abortion, helping to pass that bill into law.

Three years later, in 2006, Biden told Texas Monthly in an interview that he did “not view abortion as a choice and a right,” and that he considered it to be “always a tragedy.”

Biden, in 2006, said that he believed that abortion should be both “rare and safe,” and suggested that “we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions.”

In 2012, when running for a second term as vice president, Biden stated during the vice presidential debate that his personal social doctrine has been “particularly informed” by his Catholic faith.

“With regard to abortion, I accept my Church’s position that life begins at conception,” said Biden. “That’s the Church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and–I just refuse to impose that on others.”

The 2016 Democratic Platform included, for the first time, a plank in its platform pledging to overturn the Hyde Amendment.

By 2019, Biden, defending himself against Sen. Kamala Harris during a Democratic presidential candidate debate, stated that he believed abortion to be a “constitutional right.”

“I’ve supported it and I will continue to support it and I will, in fact, move as president to see to it that the Congress legislates that that is the laws as well,” said Biden.

Biden, who has made his Catholicism a campaign issue, has clashed repeatedly with Church authorities over his growing support for abortion.

In October 2019, he was refused Communion at a Catholic church in South Carolina. The priest denied Biden Communion in accord with a 2004 diocesan policy that prohibits politicians who have been supportive of legal protection for abortion from receiving the Eucharist.

“Catholic public officials who consistently support abortion on demand are cooperating with evil in a public manner. By supporting pro-abortion legislation they participate in manifest grave sin, a condition which excludes them from admission to Holy Communion as long as they persist in the pro-abortion stance,” says a 2004 decree signed jointly by the bishops of Atlanta, Charleston, and Charlotte.

At the time Biden was denied Communion, his website stated that one of his priorities as president would be to “work to codify Roe v. Wade” into federal law, and that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate the constitutional right to an abortion,” including laws requiring waiting periods, ultrasounds, and parental notification of a minor’s abortion.

“Vice president Biden supports repealing the Hyde Amendment because healthcare is a right that should not be dependent on one’s zip code or income,” said his website.

More recently, Biden has vowed to overturn religious freedom protections and force the Little Sisters of the Poor and similar groups to provide contraception, sterilizations, and abortifacients through employee health coverage.

Earlier this month, following a Supreme Court ruling upholding an executive order by the Trump administration providing conscience protections for the so-called contraceptive mandate, Biden expressed his “disappointment” in the court’s decision and disagreement with the exemption for the sisters, adding that there is “a clear path to fixing it: electing a new president.”


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17 Comments

  1. It promises to be amusing watching him attempt to walk a line on this one. He’ll undoubtedly say something like “I accept my Church’s position on abortion but I refuse to impose my views on others”, as he has been saying since forever, and hope that does the trick, as it probably has up until now, but one of these times it won’t work.

    I for one am not asking him to impose his beliefs on others, but I would ask him to DEFEND what he says are his deeply held beliefs – just once. Just ONCE.

  2. Buden is never going to make it to November with showing the world he has dementia, and we could never ever elect a President with dementia.

  3. Could you imagine yourself transported back to 1860 and sitting around the supper table listening to your weasel of an uncle say” I do not believe in slavery and I do not presently own one, but I will defend the right of every American to own one”. That uncle sounds a lot like Biden doesn’t he?

  4. Why is the Catholic church so afraid to confront Catholics like Biden and Pelosi? IF God is for you, who can be against you? I think you are out of touch with your people. I know a lot of “Catholics” who vote for the demoncratic party and all they stand for….especially abortion! Practice church discipline!

  5. Steve:
    “Could you imagine yourself transported back to 1860 and sitting around the supper table listening to your weasel of an uncle say” I do not believe in slavery and I do not presently own one, but I will defend the right of every American to own one”. That uncle sounds a lot like Biden doesn’t he?”
    *****
    No, not really. From what I’ve learned looking up family history, outside of some dedicated abolitionists slavery wasn’t much of an issue with the majority of the American population before it became a useful tool to continue an unpopular war. Abolition was much more relevant in the UK & they’d already found a non-bloody way to end slavery in their colonies by reimbursing slave owners for their loss of property. It’s a shame that we didn’t follow suit & saved over half a million American lives.
    Non-slave owners generally didn’t want bloodshed to defend the rights of slave owners. Why would they?

    • Mrscracker, the south was heavily invested in slavery and obviously the north lesss,so what? It took a great president to make it an issue for the union. Do you think a politician like Biden has the gumption of aLincoln? Your line of thinking is truly convoluted,Biden is truly the antithesis of greatness.

  6. Use of taxpayer funds for the purpose of sacrifice to Moloch is an indictment of complicity of the entire nation. I pray to the Holy Spirit every day that this Catholic-in-name-only, confused, false Shepard does not cause ruination of the faithful.

  7. If only we had Bishops with the faith and courage of a St. Thomas Beckett to publicly excommunicate these “Catholic” leaders.

  8. Steve,
    I understand the point you were trying to make in your illustration but the illustration didn’t quite work for me. My fault for taking things too literally.

    Lincoln was a very interesting and tragic man and certainly better spoken than Biden.

    I don’t know that making slavery an issue to
    further an unpopular war that took over half a million lives was a sign of greatness. I’d say it was more a sign of political skill. And to be fair, firing on Fort Sumter was a sign of very poor judgment.
    The whole thing was a terrible waste of human life. Britain accomplished the same results without a drop of blood shed. I don’t know if that’s greatness but it’s surely a better strategy. Shame on us for not taking a cue from the UK.

  9. all you people commenting on here apparently dont know, or you do know but just dont care, that trump is also pro-choice…he only says he is pro-life for the votes…please dont fall for this…vote responsibly in November and vote trump out

  10. J.A.C.:
    “all you people commenting on here apparently dont know, or you do know but just dont care, that trump is also pro-choice…he only says he is pro-life for the votes”
    ******

    And what difference would that make for his administration? What’s in Mr. Trump’s heart is between him & God & he will have to account for it.
    What sort of federal judges are appointed & what legislation is enacted under his administration is what he is accountable to voters for. So far I’m quite pleased with the campaign promises kept. Whether Mr. Trump personally believes in the values behind each of those promises doesn’t really signify much to me.
    Actions speak louder, etc.

  11. You hypocrites ! You shame a good man. You are all so anti abortion yet are fine with caging children, fine with separating children from their parents, support a man that has admitted grabbing women by their genitalia and is friends with a known child rapist. I can go on and on. You care for the unborn and not the born.

    • You hypocrite, Michael! You pretend to be concerned about “caging children” and separating them from parents who have deliberately put them through dangerous situations but you are just fine with butchering babies – in other words, you don’t think babies’ lives are worth anything.

      Anybody who supports abortion, as Mr. Biden does, is not a good man.

      The president spoke crudely in what he thought was a private conversation; if I dismissed every man who did that from consideration for public office, the field would be extremely limited. Tell me, are you willing to condemn the behavior or William Clinton and say that he should not have been president because of his behavior?

      That “known child rapist” was thrown out of Mar a Lago when he abused an underage female employee. If anyone with whom you are friendly is revealed to be guilty of sexual abuse or misbehavior or any other kind of moral turpitude, are you going to step right up and share the blame?

      It’s very ironic that the pro-abortion and pro-contraception people are more than happy to hand out contraceptives to and to perform abortions on underage girls; but it suddenly become “child rape” when they see some political benefit from it.

    • Tell you what, Michael, I see absolutely no hypocrisy in standing up for the unborn, the most defenseless among us. Nor do I apologize for not wanting my tax dollars going to pay for someone else’s abortion. And I strenuously object to my government trampling on the First Amendment in order to force a group of Catholic nuns to violate the deepest tenets of their faith in order to provide contraceptives to their female employees. If that is hypocrisy in your eyes, then I wear that as a badge of honor. On the other hand, Mr. Biden might do well to remember these words: “what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?”

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