Democratic Primaries

Where does Biden stand on abortion?
He supports abortion rights — but he hasn’t always. Over his nearly 50-year career, he has swung back and forth, grappling with what he saw as a conflict between abortion rights and his Catholic faith.

When he became a senator in 1973, he argued that the Supreme Court had gone “too far” in its Roe v. Wade ruling. Later, he shifted to say that abortion should be legal but the government shouldn’t fund it. That was his position until this month, which brings us to the Hyde Amendment.

For decades, Mr. Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion under programs like Medicaid. As recently as June 5 {2019}, he said he still did.

With an anti-abortion president, Ronald Reagan, in power and Republicans controlling the Senate for the first time in decades, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that had made abortion legal nationwide several years earlier.

The amendment — which the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights” — cleared a key hurdle in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982. Support came not only from Republicans but from a 39-year-old, second-term Democrat: Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background,” Mr. Biden, a Roman Catholic, said at the time. The decision, he said, was “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.”

The bill never made it to the full Senate, and when it came back up the following year, Mr. Biden voted against it. His back-and-forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career.