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Biden tells Congress to codify Roe, pass LGBTQ protections

February 8, 2023 Catholic News Agency 1
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address during a joint meeting of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 7, 2023, in Washington, D.C. The speech marks Biden’s first address to the new Republican-controlled House. / Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Washington D.C., Feb 8, 2023 / 06:08 am (CNA).

During his 2023 State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Joe Biden called on Congress to codify Roe v. Wade and pass legislation banning discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. The proposals put him at odds with the U.S. Catholic bishops.

“Here in the people’s House, it’s our duty to protect all the people’s rights and freedoms,” Biden said. “Congress must restore the right that was taken away [when the Supreme Court overturned] Roe v. Wade.” 

Codifying Roe v. Wade would establish federal abortion laws that mirror the standards that were set under the now obsolete Roe v. Wade decision. Such a law would prohibit states from banning abortion and would prevent certain state-level abortion restrictions.

Since the Supreme Court overturned the ruling, 13 states have banned most abortions and another five have imposed more restrictions on abortion. In six other states, proposed bans and restrictions have been held up in the court system. 

“The vice president and I are doing everything to protect access to reproductive health care and safeguard patient [privacy],” the president said. “But already, more than a dozen states are enforcing extreme abortion bans. Make no mistake about it; if Congress passes a national abortion ban, I will veto it.”

Although Biden is the nation’s second Catholic president, he remains at odds with American Catholic bishops and Catholic Church teaching. In July, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Pro-Life Activities referred to an attempt to codify Roe v. Wade as “the most unjust and extreme abortion on demand bill our nation has ever seen.” 

Bishop Thomas Tobin of the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, tweeted his thoughts on the issue before the president’s speech. 

“The ‘state of the union’ is fatally flawed if we are committed to supporting, promoting, and paying for abortion,” Tobin said. “A nation that destroys its own children has no future.”

The National Right to Life Committee criticized Biden after the State of the Union address. NRLC accused Biden of being “the most pro-abortion president in history.” 

“The Biden administration and the Democratic Party have yet to hear of an abortion they wouldn’t support,” NRLC President Carol Tobias said in a statement. “Tragically, women and their unborn babies will be the ones to suffer.”

In addition to the president’s support for abortion, he reiterated his support for laws that would establish federal civil rights protections for people identifying as LGBTQ. The legislation, known as the Equality Act, would ban discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. 

“Let’s also pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity,” Biden said. ‘Our strength is not just the example of our power but the power of our example. Let’s remember the world’s watching.”

This legislation has also received pushback from the USCCB. 

According to the Catholic bishops, it would threaten religious freedom by forcing religiously operated organizations and faith-based charities to “host functions that violate their beliefs” and “violate their religious beliefs.” 

The bishops raised their concerns that the legislation would require faith-based hospitals to provide abortions and gender transition surgery. The USCCB also said the act would force biological females to share locker rooms and compete in sports with biological males who identify as female. 

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The Dispatch

Bishop Barron says Minnesota’s new abortion law is ‘the worst kind of barbarism’

February 2, 2023 Catholic News Agency 13
Bishop Robert Barron spoke out against Minnesota’s new abortion law after it passed Jan. 31, 2023. / Credit: Bishop Robert Barron/YouTube

Boston, Mass., Feb 2, 2023 / 12:45 pm (CNA).

Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron called a newly passed Minnesota abortion bill that enshrines abortion rights into law “the worst kind of barbarism.”

“I want to share with you my anger, my frustration over this terrible law that was just signed by the governor in Minnesota — the most really extreme abortion law that’s on the books in the wake of the Roe v. Wade reversal,” Barron said in a Jan. 31 video on social media following Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s signing of the bill on Tuesday.

The bill, titled the Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act, enshrines a constitutional right to “reproductive freedom,” ensuring the right to abortion in Minnesota up to birth for any reason, as well as the right to contraception and sterilization.

“Basically, it eliminates any kind of parental notifications so a 12-year-old child can get an abortion without even telling her parents about it,” Barron said. 

“But the worst thing,” he added, “is it basically permits abortion all the way through pregnancy up to the very end. And indeed, indeed if a child somehow survives a botched abortion, the law now prohibits an attempt to save that child’s life.”

Protection for abortion in the state had preexisted the new law because the state’s Supreme Court ruled in the 1995 decision Doe v. Gomez that a woman had a constitutional right to abortion. Several restrictions to abortion in the state have also been ruled unconstitutional in the courts in prior years, the AP reported. Sponsors of the bill supported it because they wanted abortion protections in law, despite the political leaning of future appointed justices, the AP reported.

Pro-life advocates fiercely opposed the bill, as it gained national attention and underwent several hours of debate in the state Senate. The pro-life advocacy organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called the legislation “the most extreme bill in the country.” 

Barron said that “I don’t know why this is really debated anymore in our country, but this strikes me as just the worst kind of barbarism. And in the name of, I don’t know, subjectivity, and freedom, and choice and all this, we’re accepting this kind of brutality.”

Barron’s condemnation of the law echoes that of the Minnesota bishops who raised their voices against it before its passage. 

The states’ bishops wrote in a Jan. 26 statement: “To assert such unlimited autonomy is to usurp a prerogative that belongs to God alone. Authorizing a general license to make and take life at our whim will unleash a host of social and spiritual consequences with which we as a community will have to reckon.”

In his video, Barron added: “What strikes me is this: If a child is born and now a day old, or two days old and resting peacefully in his bassinet and someone broke into the house and with a knife killed the child and dismembered him, well, the whole country would rise up in righteous indignation.”

“But yet, that same thing can happen with complete impunity as the child is in his mother’s womb about to be born. Again, I just think this is so beyond the pale and that we’ve so lost our way on this issue,” he said.

He acknowledged that there was no possibility of blocking the now-enacted legislation, but said that “we can certainly keep raising our voices in protest.”

“We can keep praying for an end to this barbaric regime in our country,” he said.

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