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Calls to “Restore Roe” and protect reproductive rights were a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night, but there’s one thing the speech was missing: the word “abortion.”
Groups like the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Rights for All lauded Biden for highlighting reproductive rights and inviting Kate Cox, a Texas mom who was denied emergency abortion care and had to travel out of state to receive an abortion, to watch him speak.
But some supporters of abortion rights took issue with the fact that he didn’t use the word “abortion” once, even though it was written in his prepared remarks for the evening.
“It was wonderful to see Kate Cox and her story be uplifted and, you know, condemn that she had to leave her state to get an abortion,” Kellie Copeland, the executive director of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, told NBC News. “But then to not say the word? I think it implies that it’s taboo, and it’s not. It was the health care that she needed. And it’s the health care that many women, trans and nonbinary people have every right to.”
Jessica Mason Pieklo, the executive editor at Rewire News Group, a news organization focusing on reproductive health care, told NBC News that using the word “abortion” is important to help destigmatize the procedure.
“I think it was good that abortion got as much airtime in the president’s speech that it did,” Mason Pieklo said. “But … the need to say the word abortion from the highest ranks of a Democratic administration is important,” he added, “not just for optics, but because it helps tremendously in the destigmatization of abortion as a medical procedure.”
Biden, who is Catholic and has said he doesn’t personally believe in abortion, has faced scrutiny from women’s rights groups for shying away from the term. He didn’t say the word publicly as president until more than a year into his presidency, when Politico published the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, according to We Testify, an abortion rights group that has been tracking how often Biden says the word “abortion” in his presidency.
Last year, he told attendees at a fundraiser in Maryland: “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion. But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.”
One Biden administration official familiar with the president’s State of the Union speech pushed back on claims that he intentionally left the word “abortion” out, saying it’s not uncommon for Biden to deviate from prepared remarks.
They also pointed out that reproductive rights was the first domestic issue he addressed in the speech, and that he’s spent a lot of his presidency focused on restoring reproductive freedom.
Emma Hernandez, the communications manager for We Testify, which connects and represents women who have had abortions across the U.S., says that Biden still doesn’t use the term often enough. “We’re seeing that when he does use the word abortion, sometimes it’s still very stigmatizing,” she said.
Hernandez added that Biden is “using language like ‘difficult decisions’ or, you know, ‘a decision no one wants to make,’ and that’s not reflective of our experiences as people who have had abortions.”
Hernandez said that only highlighting women who seek abortions in emergency situations obscures the fact that the majority of women who get abortions do not seek them out for emergency care.
Failing to use the word abortion is also symptomatic of a broader issue, abortion rights activists say — that Biden doesn’t have a clear plan to tackle abortion rights beyond calling to “Restore Roe,” or go back to the constitutional right to abortion outlined in the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.
Mason Pieklo said that Roe still left states the opportunity to restrict abortion in some ways, creating a patchwork of state-by-state care that got worse after the Supreme Court struck down Roe in 2022.
“That’s the central criticism that the Biden administration continues to hear from abortion rights advocates and supporters is that ‘Restore Roe’ is not actually a path forward. It’s a look back to a framework and a policy patchwork that failed more people than it served,” she said.
Mason Pieklo added that her group isn’t just asking for him to use the term: “We’re asking for a clear plan of action.”
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