Roe v. Wade Didn’t Go Far Enough For Abortion Rights, Hundreds Of Health Care Providers Tell Biden And Harris

More than 400 health care providers called on the Biden administration to “actively and unequivocally” support an abortion rights policy that goes further than Roe v. Wade and restores access to abortion later in pregnancy.

Advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health, along with 430 physicians providing sexual and reproductive health care, on Tuesday sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, urging them to do better on abortion care and gender-affirming care.

Since the Supreme Court repealed federal abortion protections in 2022, Biden has continually supported restoring Roe, which protected abortion access until around 24 weeks on the federal level. But many abortion rights advocates say that Roe was inherently flawed, allowing targeted restrictions on abortion providers that chipped away at access even where it was legal and left out people who needed abortion care past fetal viability.

“While Roe provided a constitutional right to abortion, it never ensured access to that right for all those who needed it,” reads the letter, which was shared exclusively with HuffPost. “The promise of Roe, the legal right to abortion care, was never fulfilled.”

When Roe was still intact, pregnant people routinely had to travel across state lines to get care later in pregnancy, and hundreds were criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes . More than 1,300 abortion restrictions , or TRAP laws, were enacted in the years after Roe was decided in 1973. These laws forced many abortion clinics to shut down, creating a dynamic where abortion care was legal on a federal level but not actually accessible in many parts of the country.

“We urge the Administration and law makers across the country to broaden