Fact check: Biden says abortion ruling makes U.S. 'an outlier among developed nations'
President Joe Biden claimed that the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade made America an aberration when it comes to abortion access. PolitiFact checks his claim.
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President Joe Biden claimed that the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade made America an aberration when it comes to abortion access.
"With this decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country," Biden said a couple hours after the ruling was released on June 24. "They have made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world."
While the high court’s decision leaves in place state laws that permit abortion, it removes the national right to an abortion — something that is widely guaranteed by laws or court rulings in other developed nations.
With few exceptions, legal abortion is available in "peer nations," including in countries comparable to the U.S. in terms of development or in their use of a common law system, said Martha Davis, a law professor at Northeastern University who filed an amicus brief in 2021 with the court arguing that Roe should not be overturned.
In U.S., abortion access varies
The high court ruled 6-3 to uphold a restrictive Mississippi law and 5-4 to reverse Roe, with the majority opinion saying "the Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion." The decision ended nearly 50 years of federally protected access to abortion and returned power to individual states to set their own laws.
Sixteen states, including California and New York, plus the District of Columbia, have passed laws allowing access to abortions.
Eighteen states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, are about to see abortion become illegal soon, if not immediately. These states either have pre-Roe laws restricting abortion that snap back into effect if Roe is overturned, or they have "trigger" laws that were written to take effect in the absence of Roe.
In the remaining 16 states, the legality of abortion is currently unclear, for various reasons. This includes such states as Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
In the U.S., "we’re going to have some places that are at no abortion at all," which is "clearly an outlier" among other nations, she said.
Abortion in G7 nations
Developed nations consisting of the world’s leading economies are sometimes referred to as the G7, or the Group of Seven, which includes the U.S. and six other industrialized nations. Unlike the U.S., those six have national laws or court decisions that allow access to abortion, with various restrictions.
Laws "vary widely from place to place," said Davis of Northeastern University, and in some countries, you might need to obtain an additional doctor's note after certain stages of pregnancy. But in many such situations "those sorts of regulations are not significant hurdles to people."
"They're not used as kind of weapons in the way that sometimes they are in the United States, as a way of preventing people from from getting an abortion," she said.
The three dissenting justices argued that the global trend "has been toward increased provision of legal and safe abortion care."
A number of countries, including New Zealand, the Netherlands and Iceland, permit abortions up to a roughly similar time as Roe did (up to 24 weeks), and most Western European countries "often have liberal exceptions" to time-limit restrictions, including to prevent harm to a woman’s physical or mental health, they wrote.
By its review, 38 countries have changed their abortion laws since 2008, and all but one of those changes "expanded the legal grounds on which women can access abortion services."
PolitiFact ruling
Biden said the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade "made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world" on abortion rights.
The ruling eliminates the national right to an abortion, which puts the U.S. at odds with other developed nations, including the other six G-7 nations, most of which have laws or court rulings that provide for abortion access on a national basis, though with restrictions. The U.S. ruling does leave in place state laws that permit abortion.
We rate Biden’s statement Mostly True.
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