Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to Abortion Advocates

W hen Joe Biden welcomed Donald Trump in the White House last week, he seemed like a different man. Gone was the feeble, senescent, dysarthric figure whose condition, long denied by Democrats, became so obvious after his June debate with Trump that those same Democrats forced him to abandon his presidential run.

In his place was a polite and lively man far closer to the Onion’s Obama-era caricature of him: the wild and fun-loving uncle depicted in such stories as “Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am In White House Driveway.” Speculation abounded. Was Biden simply relieved that the election was over? Or was he secretly delighted that Kamala Harris, his own vice president, who ran for president instead of him, had failed?

Whatever explains Biden’s condition that day, another recent White House visitor ought to dispel any notion that he has had some benign late-in-presidency transformation. Rather, Biden’s awarding Cecile Richards, until 2018 the head of Planned Parenthood, a presidential medal of freedom shows how little has changed for him this term — but also, how much he has changed on the issue of abortion, as has the Democratic Party overall, over the course of recent decades.

The presidential medal of freedom originated in the noble intention to recognize civilian excellence. As the presidency has tended toward the monarchical, the medal has followed it away from our small-r republicanism. It now represents a quasi-knighthood. But in a society lacking the trappings of monarchy, it increasingly reflects the base political affinities of the awarder. Biden himself received one, from former president Barack Obama. Previously, Biden bestowed one on Nancy Pelosi.

Richards’s award fits this pattern. Look past the gauzy platitudes of Biden’s congratulation of her for leading us “with absolute courage” and “fearlessly” toward “the America we say we are — a nation of freedom.” Ignore his euphemistic admiration of Richards’s work to “defend and advance women’s reproductive rights and equality.” Richards herself has disdained such euphemism: She was the first speaker to use the word “abortion” at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. “It’s important to have the head of Planned Parenthood say ‘abortion,’ it’s important for any woman who’s had an abortion to say ‘abortion,’ and it’s important for us to start sharing those stories and start bringing it out of the shadows and recognizing that it’s a normal experience,” a Planned Parenthood flack explained at the time.

Richards has certainly succeeded in normalizing abortion on the left. When she left her post in 2018, Time magazine praised her for turning an organization that didn’t even have a “centralized website” in 2006, when she assumed her leadership role, into a bona fide political player in the Democratic Party. Now, what was once the party of “safe, legal, and rare” abortion moved aggressively toward a position of no-limit, taxpayer-funded abortion.

Earlier this year, Kamala Harris became the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic. In her debate with Donald Trump, she declined to rule out supporting abortions in the final months of pregnancy. Just before the election, Harris rejected conscience protections for abortion. Pro-life Democrats, once a real political presence, have either changed their views or vanished from political office. As Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life, lamented of her party last month, “If we can no longer agree on protecting the most vulnerable members of the human family, then we’ve grown too far apart.”

Joe Biden could once have plausibly called himself one of these now-vanished figures. America’s second Catholic president, Biden actually supported a number of pro-life measures over the years. In 1976, he voted for the Hyde amendment, which prohibits the funding of abortion with federal funds. In 1982, he proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade and return abortion regulation to the states. He repeatedly voted for bans on partial-birth abortion. So long as there was a range of views on abortion within the Democratic Party, Biden could place himself somewhere in the middle of it.

The party’s move left on abortion has moved its political center, and eliminated Biden’s moral center. In 2019, he abandoned his support of the Hyde amendment. In 2022, he condemned the Dobbs decision for doing exactly what he once proposed a constitutional amendment to accomplish, calling it “a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court.” He deployed federal resources to promote abortion after Roe fell. Both Pope Francis and Washington, D.C., archbishop Wilton Gregory have condemned his stance.

Joe Biden’s awarding Cecile Richards a presidential medal of freedom is the culmination of his abandoning whatever pro-life principles he may have had. He was helpless to do otherwise, if the Democratic Party remained his gyroscope; Richards’s assiduous work to radicalize the party on the issue has succeeded. It was once a satire of conservative hyperbole for the Onion to have Obama announce at the 2012 DNC that his administration would “seek to make free, taxpayer-funded abortions legal at any stage of pregnancy, even up to one full year after birth, in order to supply his newly created ‘federal stem-cell harvesting plants’ with raw materials.” Would the Onion have predicted near-universal agreement among Democrats with almost everything in that hyperbole before “even”? Or mobile abortion centers at the party’s 2024 convention?

This is the party Joe Biden may not have himself created but that he was helpless to resist, and that he helped by his transformation to bring into being. Richards’s ceremony was private, so we don’t know whether Biden was as lucid and effervescent as he was when he met with Trump. But the act itself was a clear enough demonstration of what has become of him on this issue. As he rides off into the presidential sunset, this deserves to be remembered as part of his ignominious legacy.