Less than 12 hours after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to take no action to protect the civil rights of women in Texas to obtain abortions President Joe Biden announced he has ordered federal government agencies to determine what actions they can take to protect women’s constitutionally-protected right to reproductive services.
President Biden blasted the five conservative justices who voted to allow the Texas law that effectively bans abortion in the Lone Star State to stand, calling their overnight ruling “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights under Roe v. Wade, which has been the law of the land for almost fifty years.”
Declaring that the Texas law “unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers,” President Biden said in a statement he is directing his Gender Policy Council, the first of its kind, and “the Office of the White House Counsel to launch a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision.”
Biden adds he is “looking specifically to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions as protected by Roe, and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”