Biden's Abortion Record Could Cause Him Problems in a Presidential Bid
As Democrats fret about Hillary Clinton's electoral prospects, Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as a viable alternative and steadily risen in the polls. Unlike the outright socialist Bernie Sanders, Biden and Clinton have largely fallen into the Democratic consensus on policy issues over their decades in politics. (Their one noted area of divergence, on how aggressive America's foreign policy should be, has not been a dominant topic so far in the presidential election.)
But there's one domestic issue on which Biden has occasionally strayed from the Democratic mainstream during his more than 40 years in politics. Biden has been an inconsistent supporter of reproductive rights, sometimes backing the legal right of women to choose how to handle a pregnancy, while often hewing to his Catholic faith and moralizing against all abortions. Even today, when he and Clinton would most likely agree on most of the policy substance of ensuring access to abortion clinics, Biden sticks to a pro-life view in his personal politics.
During the early part of his career, abortion rights groups griped about Biden as an unreliable ally. "Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us," a Planned Parenthood official said in 1986.
When he first entered national politics, Biden was willing to stand alongside politicians who wanted to make abortion illegal. In a Washingtonian profile published the year after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a nationwide right to abortion, Biden unequivocally criticized the ruling. "I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion," he said. "I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body."
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/joe-biden-abortion-roe-wade
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