WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – President Joe Biden claimed to “like babies better than people” Thursday, a quip that drew a macabre contrast with his full-throated support of having preborn babies killed via abortion.
BizPac Review reports that Biden was speaking during a White House ceremony to mark the thirteenth anniversary of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the federal healthcare law better known as ObamaCare that was enacted while Biden was vice president of Barack Obama.
At one point, a crying baby in the audience interrupted Biden’s remarks. “That’s all right, we like babies, you don’t have to worry about it,” the president said. “It’s okay, it’s all right. Matter of fact, I like babies better than people.”
The moment, innocuous in isolation, drew laughter and applause, and the White House later released a photo of Biden holding a baby after the fact. But while the implication that babies are not people could arguably be dismissed as stemming from the elderly president’s habit of rhetorical imprecision, the joke takes on a darker tone in the context of how his policies actually treat babies.
Early in his career as a U.S. senator, the Catholic-identifying Biden was pro-life, condemning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and repeatedly supporting restrictions on public funding of abortion; in 1982, he was one of only two Democrats to support a proposed constitutional amendment that would have overturned Roe. But as the years went on, his voting record grew more aligned with the abortion lobby and the needs of Democrat party politics.
“I’m prepared to accept as a matter of faith – my wife and I, my family,” that “at the moment of conception there’s human life and being,” Biden told America Magazine in 2015. “But what I’m not prepared to do is to impose” a “rigid” or “precise” view on the issue that is “born out of my faith, on other people who are equally God-fearing, equally as committed to life.”
While campaigning for president in 2019, Biden disavowed the Hyde Amendment against federal abortion funding after just one day of pressure from his left-wing base, jettisoning the last vestige of his pro-life past and putting the finishing touch on his status as an absolutist for unlimited abortion-on-demand at taxpayers’ expense.
This February, Biden declared, “Congress must restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose” abortion. “The Vice President and I are doing everything we can to protect access to reproductive health care and safeguard patient privacy. But already, more than a dozen states are enforcing extreme abortion bans. Make no mistake; if Congress passes a national abortion ban, I will veto it.”
Codifying Roe in a bill such as the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act or Freedom of Choice Act would not only restore but expand the Roe status quo by making it illegal for states to pass virtually any pro-life laws.
So dedicated to promoting abortion is Biden that his administration is currently promulgating rules and legal guidance allowing for abortion pills to be dispensed via the mail, in violation of federal law and without regard for potential health harms to pregnant women who take the pills without medical supervision.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last June overturning Roe and restoring states’ ability to set their own abortion laws, Planned Parenthood has suspended abortions and/or closed locations across the country, and pro-life attorneys general have declared their intentions to enforce their states’ duly enacted abortion prohibitions.
But leftists prosecutors in various localities have vowed not to enforce such laws, and pro-abortion activists have refocused efforts on interstate distribution of abortion pills, interstate travel for abortion, and enshrining “rights” to abortion in state constitutions, effectively insulating the practice from ordinary state legislation. On the national level, Democrats currently lack the votes in Congress to codify Roe, but whether they get those votes is sure to be one of the major issues of the 2024 elections.