Joe Biden Plans Campaign Trip to Florida to Promote Abortion

President Joe Biden is expected to give a speech in Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday decrying the state’s six-week abortion restriction before it is set to go into effect. 

Biden will tie Florida’s abortion restriction to the 2024 presidential election and talk about “the stakes of this election for reproductive freedom across the entire country,” NBC News first reported. The president is expected to blame his opponent, former President Donald Trump, for Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022 and for the wave of state restrictions in the wake of the ruling, including the recent Arizona Supreme Court decision upholding a near-total abortion ban from 1864. 

Biden is also “expected to say that if re-elected, Trump and his allies will enact a federal abortion ban.” However, the former president has said he believes the abortion issue should be left to the states.

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“From Arizona to Florida, more and more Americans are seeing up close the devastating impact of Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” Morgan Mohr, senior adviser for reproductive rights for the Biden-Harris campaign, said in a statement. “While Donald Trump continues to brag about unleashing these extreme and dangerous bans, President Joe Biden is running to restore reproductive freedom. Since the overturning of Roe, whenever reproductive rights have been on the ballot, they have won, and this November will be no different.”

The Florida event is “significant for Biden,” NBC News notes, pointing out that the Biden campaign often looks to Vice President Kamala Harris as the ultimate abortion hype-woman. 

“Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the federal right to abortion in June 2022, Harris has held more than 80 events across 20 states focused on reproductive freedom, including delivering a speech last week in Arizona criticizing the ban in that state and tying in former President Donald Trump’s role in allowing abortion restrictions to take place,” according to the report. 

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The campaign “sees Florida’s abortion ban as especially salient because, once in effect, the six-week ban will affect the entire Southeast, given that many women in states with stricter abortion bans have traveled to Florida to get abortions,” the report notes. 

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court issued two decisions: one upheld a 15-week limit on abortion, which paved the way for the six-week abortion limit, which passed last year; and another allowed a proposed amendment that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state Constitution up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy to appear on the ballot in November.

Within 24 hours of the decisions, Biden’s reelection campaign and top Democrats began mobilizing and fundraising, hoping to galvanize Florida voters around the issue of abortion while also pulling more votes for themselves in a state with a massive Republican advantage. Florida Republicans led Democrats by 854,318 registered voters as of early March, according to Florida’s Voice, which looked at voter registration data at the county level.

Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez released a memo following the rulings, declaring that Florida is now “winnable.” Trump notably led the state by 370,000 votes in 2020.