Former Vice President Joe Biden fired back on Wednesday at calls for him to run for president, saying the abortion debate is an area where he stands apart from his fellow Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who recently released a statement saying she wants Roe v. Wade affirmed.
While Biden didn’t mention Clinton, who opposed Trump’s travel ban on visitors and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries during her 2016 bid, he continued to support Roe v. Wade, including during a conversation with a Yale University student journalist who confronted him during a speech on Wednesday.
“I know what happens here in the Midwest,” he said, pointing to a short video posted to Twitter. “It’s about a girl who was 13 years old, and she got pregnant. And her parents didn’t agree with it, and you think that that’s a tragedy. And you think that that should happen to somebody. The decision made by the federal court that I was on that gave that right to the states was Roe v. Wade.”
A politician I worked closely with as a senator in the 1990s wrote an op-ed on Wednesday with some choice words for some progressive political leaders who broke with long-held Democratic stances on the abortion issue. https://t.co/aZ3UWpNwru pic.twitter.com/aV5TRrGXGt — Kent Smetters (@KentSmetters) May 31, 2018
While campaigning for Clinton in Cleveland on Tuesday, the former first lady also made it clear that she wants to reaffirm Roe v. Wade, after she said she would “evolve” on the issue.
“Just imagine if Roe v. Wade, which was the right to privacy — ‘to privacy’ — has been overturned,” Clinton said during a speech. “Where are we going to be? That is a horrifying thought. How do we carry on in a way that upholds the most fundamental principle of a woman’s right to choose?”
In response to Biden’s comments about the case, a spokesperson for Clinton said: “This isn’t one of those things where some simple flip-flop doesn’t make a difference, it’s a matter of life and death.”