President Joe Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance was alarming on many fronts. But there was one element that was particularly troubling for pro-life Americans: his garbled articulation of Roe v. Wade. 

Biden reveres Roe. Never mind that he disagreed with its reasoning as a freshman senator when it came out 51 years ago. Today, it’s his fifth gospel, the lynchpin of his abortion-focused presidency and now-faltering reelection campaign. 

You might recall the exchange Biden had two years ago on the South Lawn of the White House with EWTN White House Correspondent Owen Jensen. Just before the president flew away aboard Marine One, Jensen managed to ask him if he thought there should be any restrictions on abortion. 

“Yes, there should be,” Biden responded.  

When Jensen asked what those restrictions should be, Biden yelled back, “It’s Roe v. Wade. Read it, man. You’ll get educated,” before hurrying off to the helicopter. 

The question is: Has Joe read Roe? 

You have to wonder, especially after what he said during his debate with former president Donald Trump. 

Biden accused Trump of “lying” when he said that Roe allowed abortion up to the moment of birth. 

“That is simply not true,” Biden retorted. “Roe v. Wade does not provide for that. That’s not the circumstance. Only when the woman’s life is in danger, if she’s going to die — that’s the only circumstance in which that can happen.” 

But what Biden said simply isn’t true. Roe, which concocted a constitutional basis for a woman’s “right” to kill her unborn child, allowed states to ban abortion in the final trimester of pregnancy unless it was deemed necessary to protect the life or health of the mother. 

Many Americans — and it would be shocking if the president of the United States were among them — wrongly assume that by “health” the Supreme Court majority in Roe referred only to situations where a woman faced a dire medical emergency.  

But the same majority that decided Roe issued a companion ruling in a second 1973 abortion case, Doe v. Bolton, that broadly defined “health” to include “all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the well-being of the patient.” 

Roe and Doe, then, are opposite sides of the same coin. Taken together, they effectively made it legal to abort a child at any time and for any reason. That changed two years ago when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe — and by extension, Doe, as well, since the latter ruling affirmed Roe. 

Late-term abortions are rare, less than 1% of the total, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that doesn’t mean they don’t happen, as pro-abortion advocates would like you to believe. 

Biden and other abortion proponents like to pretend that Doe didn’t exist. During the debate, the president said, “We are not for late-term abortion. Period, period, period.” 

Period, period, period? Yet Biden and his party want to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would make completely unfettered abortion the new law of the land.  

It needs to be said that Trump also exasperated many in the pro-life movement during the debate when he voiced his support for the Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing the Biden administration’s authorization of mail-order abortion pills to remain in place. 

“I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it,” he said, a stance that could have enormous implications if Trump is elected, given that medication abortions now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. But Trump’s still-evolving abortion pivot is nowhere near Biden’s doubling and tripling down on his radical abortion views. During the debate, the president went so far as to compare opposition to abortion to opposing the civil-rights movement.  

It was a dispiriting night for those of us in the pro-life movement, to be sure, but we must remain vigilant and hold our government leaders accountable for upholding America’s founding principles, which are grounded in the inviolability of human dignity. That includes the Republican Party, which should resist efforts to water down its long-standing commitment to the pro-life cause when it approves its platform later this summer. 

Please continue to pray for our country, our leaders and the unborn. 

May God bless you!