Jill Biden in Pa. says Dobbs decision ‘drew new blood from wounds that had healed’

First lady Jill Biden speaks at a Women for Biden Harris event at Millersville University June 23, 2024 (Capital-Star photo)

MILLERSVILLE — The Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago “drew new blood from wounds that had healed,” first lady Jill Biden said Sunday at a Women for Biden-Harris event  in Lancaster County. 

“We are still fighting the battles that were settled so many decades ago,” Biden said during brief remarks at  Millersville University. “We are the first generation to give our daughters fewer rights than we had. Radical Republicans are sacrificing the health and the freedom and the futures of women in the name of their political agenda, and that’s why we’re here today.” 

The first lady once again laid the blame for overturning Roe v. Wade at the feet of former President Donald Trump, who appointed three of the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted in favor of Dobbs. She said if President Joe Biden is reelected, he would strengthen access to reproductive health care and fight for a national law that would restore Roe’s protections, including access to in-vitro fertilization and access to contraception.

Biden told the story of her high school friend who became pregnant as a teenager and had to get a psychiatric evaluation declaring her mentally unfit before the doctor would provide the procedure to end her pregnancy. After having the abortion, her friend couldn’t go home, Biden said. She asked her mother if the friend could stay with them. 

“And my mom didn’t hesitate,” Biden said. She and her mother never spoke about it afterward and her mother never told anyone.

“Secrecy, shame, silence, danger, even death: That’s what defined that time for so many women,” Biden said. “And we are being shamed back into that silence again, 50 years later.”

Biden was introduced by Lancaster OB-GYN Dr. Sharee Livingston, who told the Capital-Star she sees first hand the consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade. “I’m talking to patients every day who are fearful,” Livingston said. “I’m here to push for any legislation that improves care for all birthing women, but specifically marginalized women.”

Trump, who campaigned in Philadelphia on Saturday, has boasted about his Supreme Court nominees, but has presented conflicting positions on abortion in 2024.  Before arriving in Philadelphia, Trump spoke at the conservative Christian Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 2024 Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C, and reiterated his position that abortion laws should be left up to states. 

“The people will decide, and that’s the way it should be,” Trump said in D.C. on Saturday. He’s previously said he supports exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape, incest and the life of the pregnant patient, and earlier on the campaign trail had said he would support a 16-week nationwide ban.

The first lady said Sunday that Trump had underestimated women’s power — and their anger — over Roe v. Wade being overturned. 

“He sees us working late shifts and making grocery lists, driving to soccer practices and volunteering, caring for our parents and raising money for those in need, and he thinks we can be ignored,” she said, to boos from the audience. “He doesn’t know that when our bodies are on the line, when our daughter’s futures are at stake, we are immovable and we are unstoppable.”

‘Lives are quite literally on the line’

Biden attended a second Women for Biden Harris rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, near Pittsburgh. There, she was joined by women who shared their personal experiences with abortion.

Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato began the evening with an impassioned speech calling out Trump by name, saying his role in overturning Roe v. Wade was just the beginning. 

“Trump doesn’t want to stop there. He wants to go even further,” she said in reference to a nationwide abortion ban. “We cannot afford to go backwards by sending Trump to the White House because Roe was always the floor.” 

Reproductive rights advocate Sydney Etheredge cited a report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute that found women in states with abortion bans were nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or shortly after giving birth.

“Women’s lives across America have been put at risk because they are unable to access the care that they need,” she said. “Lives are quite literally on the line this year.”

Pennsylvania second lady Blayre Holmes Davis highlighted the work done by Black Americans throughout history to fight for “real freedom, equality and liberty.”

“Those rights and freedoms that generations before us fought for and we fight for today are under full assault by Donald Trump, and let me be clear, we will not let him get away with it,” she said. “There’s a lot on the line. My daughter’s rights, my nieces’ rights, all of our rights are on the line. And I don’t know about you, but I did not come to play.” 

Former mayor of Wilkinsburg Borough Marita Garrett shared her personal connection to reproductive rights: She is an ovarian cancer survivor who may experience additional health risks during pregnancy.

“It is harder and scarier for me to get pregnant, yet I look forward to having children of my own,” she said, “but if Donald Trump becomes president again and bans abortions nationwide, given the overwhelming disparities that already exist for Black women during and immediately after childbirth, I would be terrified of what it could mean for me and any future pregnancy.”

Kentucky abortion ban

Before wrapping the evening, Biden introduced 22-year-old Hadley Duvall, an abortion rights advocate and sexual assault survivor from Kentucky. 

“During the overturn, as I saw many people who knew me personally sharing it on social media as if it was a celebration, I went back to a place that I had been trying so hard to forget, back to the time when I was 12 years old and I was holding my first pregnancy test in my hand, and it read positive,” she said.

Duvall had been raped by her stepfather and later miscarried. In 2023, she featured in a prominent ad campaign for the governor’s race in Kentucky where she spoke of her rape. In the ad, she supported Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and directly addressed his anti-abortion Republican opponent Daniel Cameron, saying he could never understand what it’s like to be in her shoes.

Access to abortion ended immediately in Kentucky after the June 24, 2022, Dobbs decision ruling because of a “trigger law” on the books to ban the procedure in the event the court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Abortion is legal in Pennsylvania up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

“The first thing I heard once I saw that positive pregnancy test was ‘You have options,’” Duvall said at the Women for Biden-Harris event. “But now, unfortunately, women and girls who are walking in my shoes, or who may have to walk in my shoes, they don’t have anything, not even options.”

Duvall said that because she did not have a child at 12, she was able to graduate college, the first in her family to do so, and is pursuing a master’s degree in social work. She took aim at Trump’s comment earlier this month that it was “a beautiful thing to watch” each state address abortion laws.

“What is so beautiful about telling a 12-year-old girl that she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her?” she said. “To tell a girl who has already been robbed of her childhood that she will be robbed of her future as well is unthinkable, yet, because of Donald Trump, this is happening in states across the country, and if you think that they will stop there, you clearly have not been paying attention.”

The state of the election

Recent polling has Trump with a slight lead over Biden in Pennsylvania. The most recent poll from Emerson College shows in a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Biden, Trump leads 51% to 49%. When factoring in potential third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West, Emerson’s poll showed Trump’s margin over Biden widening, 45% to 42%, with Kennedy taking 5%. 

Kennedy filed the required signatures to appear on Pennsylvania’s ballot late last week, but is likely to face challenges before the August deadline. 

In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump by just over 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania. But Trump won Lancaster County in that election, 57% to Biden’s 41%.  Trump’s margin of victory in Lancaster County was even higher in 2016, when he beat Hillary Clinton 57% to 38%

The first lady has been a frequent visitor to the state during the campaign, most recently making a surprise appearance at a Pride celebration in Pittsburgh on June 1, and delivering the keynote speech at Erie County Community College’s commencement that same day. 

This article was updated at 1:10 p.m. June 25, 2024 to clarify Sydney Etheredge’s participation in the Millvale event.

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