President Biden will deliver a speech in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday, focused on reproductive rights, taking center stage on abortion about one week ahead of the state’s six-week ban taking effect. Biden is expected to place the blame for the state’s abortion restrictions squarely on former President Trump, who has repeatedly taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
The Biden campaign said the president is going to “forcefully advocate for reproductive freedom and call out Donald Trump’s abortion bans.” The campaign is making abortion rights one its top issues and is aiming to remind voters nearly every day of Trump’s record on the issue. Biden’s team is rolling out ads featuring testimony from women impacted by state abortion bans, and Vice President Harris and other top administration officials have been crisscrossing the country, hammering Republicans and Trump on abortion restrictions.
Trump has tried to neutralize Democratic arguments and repeatedly said in recent weeks that it’s left up to the states to determine abortion policy, rejecting explicit calls for a national ban. The former president was spurred to act after Florida’s Supreme Court earlier this month ruled that there is no right to an abortion in the state, upholding a 15-week abortion ban in a decision that automatically triggered a six-week ban to take effect 30 days later.
Following the court’s abortion decision, the Biden campaign said it viewed Florida as “winnable” and said it aimed to invest heavily in flipping the state. Tuesday will be Biden’s first visit to Florida since the ruling.
“Our advantage in the state isn’t just limited to abortion,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler told reporters in a call previewing the speech. “Republicans in the state have attacked Social Security. They’ve attacked Medicare. They’ve made it easier for criminals to carry guns. They’ve banned books, re-written history to say that Black people benefited from slavery and attacked our most vulnerable communities. This all follows Donald Trump’s model for MAGA extremism,” Tyler said.
Florida’s new law will be one of the most restrictive in the country, and advocates say it will effectively amount to a complete ban: six weeks gestation is before many women know they are pregnant, and the state will still require two in-person visits with the abortion provider 24 hours apart. The ban will effectively shut off abortion access in the South, where neighboring states already enforce near-total abortion bans or severe restrictions.
But despite Trump’s desire to move on, national and state Republicans have been on defense after getting exactly what they wanted when Roe was overturned. Polls show a majority of voters oppose abortion bans, and Republicans have suffered a series of losses at the ballot box that have been blamed on abortion. One day after Trump’s comments, the GOP-appointed justices of the Arizona Supreme Court resurrected an 1864 law making it a felony to perform an abortion or help someone obtain one. The law was first passed before Arizona was even a state.
