Roe v Wade: What will happen to abortion rights under President Biden?

While views have changed on abortion since Roe v Wade, the majority of Americans still believe in the right to choose. Trump was planning on overhauling law, but what will happen under Biden, asks Holly Baxter

Pro-choice and pro-life activists go head to head outside the Supreme Court during the annual March for Life in January (Getty)

Save Roe – give now,” reads an online ad from Planned Parenthood that appears at the side of my screen with increasing frequency. It’s a Google programmatic ad that follows me round the internet, mainly because I do a lot of research on the issue of women’s reproductive rights for my job, but also probably simply because I fit the demographics of “female” and “based in the US”. Despite two years of living full-time in New York City, I still find it startling when commercials concerning medical issues appear: the ads for cancer drugs on cable TV; the schizophrenia story told by happy people riding horses that drops in between episodes of 90 Day Fiancé on YouTube; the lobbying efforts of reproductive health groups like Planned Parenthood, who currently face a crisis in government funding. The cancer and schizophrenia ads are consequences of America’s half-broken healthcare system, of course. The pleas for us to “Save Roe” come from a very different place.

Roe v Wade – the lawsuit that made abortion legal in the United States – has always been contentious, but perhaps not as contentious as Donald Trump thought. Comprehensive polling by Gallup has consistently shown that most Americans support the procedure being legal, even if many would like to see more limits on when it can be performed. The polling also shows that although a lot of Americans might identify themselves as “pro-life” – 46 per cent in 2020 – they are not as hard line as that label might imply. When their views are broken down, only 20 per cent said they want abortion to be “illegal in all circumstances”, a percentage which has stayed steady, bar two percentage points flipping back and forth either way, since records began in 1975. On a trip to Alabama in 2019, I saw some evidence of this convoluted viewpoint in the people I spoke to: “I’m not saying abortion is right – never quote me as saying abortion is right,” one rosary-wearing woman told me. “But sometimes young girls just get themselves in trouble. And they’re just not ready to be mothers, pure and simple.”