If President Biden wins reelection, his top priority on Day One would be codifying abortion protections in federal law, his deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Host Kristen Welker asked, “What would on day one President Biden’s top priority be?” Fulks responded, “First of all, Roe. The president has been adamant that we need to restore Roe. It is unfathomable that women today wake up in a country with less rights than their ancestors had years ago.”
“Constitutionally speaking, abortion is not a right,” responded Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council. “Believing it is a right under the constitution is the mistake the Supreme Court fixed in the Dobbs decision. It should not be a right because no one should have the right to end someone else’s life, except in the cases of self-defense, when that would be a proportionate response.”
Nevertheless, President Biden’s reelection campaign continues to stress abortion as an election issue. “I think it’ll continue to be a really galvanizing issue, and we’ll continue to find ways to make it front and center,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said in June 2023.
This decision carries forward Democrats’ strategy from the 2022 midterm election. Although President Biden was not personally on the ballot, three weeks before election day he promised to send Congress a bill to codify Roe v. Wade — if Democrats won enough seats to pass it, which didn’t happen.
“Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives,” David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, told The Washington Stand. “The vast majority of these Republicans campaigned as pro-lifers. Thus, although the post-midterm election narrative in the national press focused on how abortion helped Democrats thwart the expected “red wave” in 2022, there are clearly other factors at play.”
For instance, “Democratic candidates and pro-abortion groups heavily outspent pro-life candidates,” Closson explained. “Likewise, many Republican consultants advised conservative candidates to focus on issues beside abortion (such as the economy or crime). The result was that many Republicans allowed their opponents to define them as extreme or out of touch on abortion.”
That perception is not necessarily correct, Backholm told The Washington Stand. “President Biden is in favor of any abortion at any time for any reason,” he said, but “the Republican side is more complicated. [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis has held the strongest pro-life position, and even signed a six-week ban in Florida. Both Trump and Nikki Haley have indicated they would be much more inclined to compromise on the issue and neither seems interested in a federal ban of any kind.”
“Democrats have convinced many Americans” that their choice is “between ‘no abortion’ and ‘all abortion,’” said Backholm, even though this is “not accurate.” However, he said, this pitch “seems to have made an impact in elections since the Dobbs decision.”
On the other hand, Closson noted that “high-profile pro-life candidates who campaigned on their strong pro-life records” actually “won decisively” in 2022, including DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R).
“There are few issues that the Bible addresses as clearly as abortion,” said Closson. “Psalm 139:13-16 and Luke 1:39-45 are probably the most well-known passages that ascribe personhood to the unborn child.”
In Psalm 139:13-16, David wrote:
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” (emphasis added)
In Luke 1:39-45, the unborn baby John the Baptist leapt for joy at the presence of the unborn baby Jesus:
“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.’” (emphasis added)
According to Luke 1:36, John was six months older than Jesus, which means, at this unborn encounter, John would have been in the third trimester, while Jesus was in the first trimester of fetal development.
From passages like these, Closson concluded, “From cover to cover, the Bible presents a pro-life ethic.”
The Bible’s pro-life ethic has implications for how American Christians consider the issue of abortion when they vote, Closson added. “As Christians living in a constitutional republic, it is a matter of stewardship to exercise our vote in a way that supports biblical principles, the most important of which is opposing abortion which is the killing of unborn children,” he said. “In terms of the 2024 election, voters can expect a stark difference between President Biden and his eventual Republican challenger.”
Over the past three years, the Biden administration has taken more than 100 actions to advance or support abortion. These actions include funneling taxpayer funding to abortion and abortion-related issues through foreign aid and the U.S. military, dismantling guardrails of the use of chemical abortion pills, targeting pro-lifers for demonstrating outside abortion clinics, and attempting to redefine civil rights laws to include abortion protections.
“It’s important that we have minimum qualifications for what we expect in our leaders,” Backholm agreed. “Running on a platform of being able to kill children we find inconvenient should be a disqualifying position for Christians.”
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
