Overturn of Roe v. Wade at center of Biden’s first 2024 campaign rally

MANASSAS—“Restore Roe,” written in giant white letters in the stage’s backdrop, nearly dwarfed President Joe Biden as he stood at the front of the stage at his first campaign rally of the 2024 race.

The performing arts center at George Mason University in Manassas, Virginia roared to life as the president offered a scathing rebuke of the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. He appealed to voters to send him back to the White House for a second term and to send him a Democratic-controlled Congress in the November election.

“We will pass a new law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade and I will sign it immediately,” he said to an animated audience.

Trump cast as the anti-abortion architect

“Remember, it was Donald Trump and the Supreme Court who ripped away the rights and freedoms of women in America, and it will be Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all of you who will restore those rights,” Biden said.

Amanda Zurawski, a woman from Austin, Texas, shared her near-death experience with a rapt crowd before the president took the stage. She had suffered catastrophic health issues 18 weeks into a pregnancy that she and her husband desperately wanted. Due to a near-total abortion ban that went into effect just after her water broke, ending her pregnancy would have been considered an illegal abortion, she said.

“It took three days and a near death crash into septic shock before my doctor could finally provide the healthcare I desperately needed,” she said. “What I went through was nothing short of barbaric and it didn’t need to happen, but it did because of Donald Trump.”

Vice President Kamala Harris laid bare the contrast between the 45^th and 46^th president before she introduced Zurawski.

Harris called Biden a courageous fighter for abortion access and lambasted Trump and the Supreme Court justices he selected as the architect of what she called a reproductive healthcare crisis.

“Across our nation, women are suffering,” she said. "He is not done and the extremists are not done.”

Virginia, the bellwether

Abortion proved to be a main motivating factor in Virginia’s 2023 state house elections.

Since the 2022 decision, states across the nation have offered patchwork access to reproductive healthcare. Nearly half of the states had banned or restricted access to abortion since the Dobbs ruling.

Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin pushed a 15-week ban on abortion ahead of the November 2023 election. Though Youngkin wasn’t on the ballot himself, he asked voters to send a Republican majority to the General Assembly to help pass that legislation. Instead, Democrats won a slim majority in both Assembly chambers in what was seen as a rebuke to his effort to limit access to abortion and a referendum on his Republican administration.

Voters in Ohio also turned out in droves to vote to enshrine access to abortion in its state constitution during their 2023 election.

Attendees eye down-ballot races

The importance of down-ballot races was not lost on the audience. Many attendees said they hoped, if a Democratic majority were to win and Biden were to be elected to a second term, access to abortion would be on path to be codified.

“People have got to realize voting, not just in presidential elections but down-ballot, is how things change,” Kris Nelson, a rally attendee from Warren County, Virginia, said.

Nelson, 51, said she was anticipating the Dobbs ruling and the subsequent overturn of Roe v. Wade since 2016, when former President Donald Trump won election. She said she was mad long before Dobbs.

“The American public supports choice and supports reproductive freedom,” Marilyn Stark, a rally attendee from Reston, Virginia, said. “There’s obviously more work to be done.”

Stark, 73, was a young mom with a 14-month-old baby when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. She said access to abortion became more real for her a few years later when she started working with teenage moms through a cooperative extension service in Illinois.

“We don’t want to be going backwards,” she said. “We worked hard to make all of this progress and now to see the erosion of reproductive rights and voting rights and gender rights, so many different things, it’s not really what the American people want or believe.”

Kelsey Lawrence, 30, from Front Royal said she was inconsolable when Roe v. Wade was overturned. “I cried for weeks,” she said.

Conflict in Gaza also top of mind

Abortion access wasn't the only issue at the top of mind for some attendees. Protestors in support of ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestine conflict interrupted the president’s speech on more than a dozen occasions.

Shouting “Ceasefire now” and “Genocide-Joe has got to go,” and often brandishing banners in support of Gaza, they were escorted from the Hylton Performing Arts Center by security and event organizers. Rally attendees attempted to shout the protestors down with chants of “Four more years” and “Let’s go Joe.”

Prior to the start of the event, about two dozen protestors gathered outside of the performing arts center and waved Palestinian flags as they chanted in support of ceasefire.

This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Biden vows abortion protections if he and Democrats win in 2024