Biden hopes abortion will keep him in the White House. But has he done enough to protect rights?

Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made a bigbet that outrage over abortion will keep the president in the White House come November.

Over the last several days, the Biden administration has unleashed a blitz of ads and events to spotlight the devastation wrought by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Biden met with a reproductive health task force, while his vice-president, Kamala Harris – who he has entrusted to lead this effort – embarked on a national tour to talk about abortion. They even devoted their first joint campaign stop of 2024 to the issue.

From the podium, Biden promised to sign any bill that would codify Roe’s protections into law and to fight back efforts by Congress to diminish abortion access.

“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, a reference to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”

Congress is unlikely to ban or protect abortion anytime soon.Not only is Congress largely frozen – it passed just 27 bills last year – but both politicalparties seem wary of tacklingnational legislation around a third-rail topic like abortion.

Now that Roe is gone, the question of if and how to regulate abortion access is largely up to state governments to answer. But the executive branch of the US government still maintains several powers to protect abortion access – and undermine it.

The Biden administration’s ability to enforce remaining federal laws that touch on abortion is perhaps its greatest weapon in the fight over the procedure. Shortly after Roe’s demise, the Biden administration announced that it believed a 1986