President Biden on Tuesday condemned abortion bans that have increasingly endangered the health of pregnant women, forcing them to grow sicker before they can receive medical care, and he laid the blame on Donald Trump, his likely Republican challenger in this year's election. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris focused on the issue at a rally in Manassas, Virginia Tuesday, their first joint campaign rally of 2024, the Guardian reports. "He's betting we won't hold him responsible," Biden said of Trump to a crowd of hundreds of cheering supporters. "He's betting you're going to stop caring." "But guess what?" he added. "I'm betting he's wrong. I'm betting you won't forget."
The rally came on the same day as the GOP primary in New Hampshire, and it demonstrated how Democrats hope to harness enduring anger over abortion restrictions to blunt his comeback bid, the AP reports. The speech was Biden's bluntest yet on abortion and the status of reproductive health, but it was disrupted several times by protests over Israel's war in Gaza. One person shouted "shame on you!" Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022 in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a decision enabled by three conservative justices appointed by Trump. "The person most responsible for taking away this freedom in America is Donald Trump," Biden said.
Biden and Harris were joined by their spouses, first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, at Monday's rally. It's the first time the four of them have appeared together since the campaign began. Jill Biden told a story about a friend who became pregnant in high school, years before Roe v. Wade. The friend, she said, needed to get a psychiatric evaluation to be declared mentally unfit before she could get the abortion. "Secrecy, shame, silence, danger, even death. That's what defined that time for so many women," she said. "And because of Dobbs that's where we're finding ourselves back again, refighting the battles we had fought." (More President Biden 2024 stories.)
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