- Biden will be in Florida a week before the state’s abortion ban takes effect
- On May 1, abortions will be prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy
- Trump has said that abortion is a state issue
President Joe Biden will attack Donald Trump on the issue of abortion in a rare visit to the former president’s home state of Florida on Tuesday.
Biden will be in Tampa a week before Florida’s abortion ban takes effect. Trump will be in New York for the second day of opening arguments in the hush money case against him.
The president’s campaign maintains that once Florida’s law goes into effect (it bans abortions after six weeks, which is before many women know they are pregnant) there will effectively be an abortion ban in the entire southeastern part of the nation.
President Joe Biden to make rare campaign appearance in Florida on Tuesday
“Many women in the Southeast may have to drive for a day or more to get to the nearest clinic,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a call with reporters Monday.
“There is one person to blame for this cruelty and it is Donald Trump.”
The president’s re-elect team also argued that Florida is in play for them this cycle.
“With our large monetary advantage, the Biden campaign has many paths to victory and that includes Florida,” Tyler said.
But this will be the first Biden campaign-related event in Florida in more than a year. He was last in the state in February 2023 when he spoke at the University of Tampa. He appeared in South Florida to raise money in January and visited the state last September to assess damage caused by Hurricane Idalia.
Trump won Florida by a 3.4-point margin in the 2020 campaign, improving on his performance four years earlier, when he beat Hillary Clinton in the state by 1.6 points.
Biden’s campaign declined to offer details about its strategy in Florida, but argued that the president traveling there is not “window dressing.”
Biden and his team have been trying to link the 2024 election to access to reproductive rights across the country.
They see it as a priority issue – and a winning issue for them – in all the battleground states across the country.
Abortion rights turned out to be a winning issue for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, when the party did much better than expected.
Biden has built on the raft of abortion laws enacted across the country since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Donald Trump said the abortion issue should be left in the hands of the states
Thousands of pro-choice activists and allies demonstrate in Orlando, Florida, to protest the state’s abortion ban.
Florida ban sparked outrage across state
Earlier this month, Trump said the abortion issue should be left up to individual states to decide.
‘My view is that now that we have abortion where everyone wanted it from a legal standpoint, states will determine it by voting or legislation, or perhaps both. And whatever they decide should be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the State,’ the former president said in a video published on his Social Truth account.
Some conservatives criticized Trump for his stance. He had previously hinted that he would accept a national ban on abortions every 15 weeks.
In Florida on Tuesday, Biden is expected to try to link the state law to the Arizona state Supreme Court decision that upheld a near-total ban on abortion dating back to 1864. The ruling was so controversial that even Trump rejected it, saying I don’t agree with that. As does conservative Republican state Senate candidate Kari Lake.
Florida’s ban goes into effect May 1.
Republican Gov. Rick Perry caused outrage in the state and even among some Republicans, who worried the ban was too restrictive.
Its implementation is expected to have a ripple effect throughout the Southeast, as women from nearby states have traveled to Florida to access legal abortion over the past two years. Nearly 7,000 women traveled from out of state last year to have an abortion performed by doctors in Florida, according to a report from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration.
Florida voters have the ability to rescind the abortion ban if they approve Amendment 4 in November, which would allow abortions up to the point of viability, which is generally considered around 24 weeks. That measure needs 60% support from voters.
Trump has yet to say how he would vote on Amendment 4.
Abortion is prohibited in most cases in 14 states. Seven other states have restrictions that prevent abortion between six and 18 weeks of pregnancy.