President Joe Biden is considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources to promote abortion access.
He made those remarks to reporters on Sunday during a stop on a bike ride near his family’s Delaware beach house.
It comes two weeks after the Supreme Court's ruling last month that ended a constitutional right to abortion.
Biden said his administration is trying to do a “lot of things to accommodate the rights of women” after the ruling.
Get DFW local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC DFW newsletters.
The move to declare a public health emergency has been pushed by advocates. However, White House officials have questioned both its legality and effectiveness.
According to the Associated Press, Jen Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said it “didn’t seem like a great option.”
“When we looked at the public health emergency, we learned a couple things: One is that it doesn’t free very many resources,” she told reporters on Friday. “It’s what’s in the public health emergency fund, and there’s very little money — tens of thousands of dollars in it. So that didn’t seem like a great option. And it also doesn’t release a significant amount of legal authority. And so that’s why we haven’t taken that action yet.”
Meanwhile, the Texas House Democratic Caucus and the bipartisan Texas Women's Health Caucus are hosting a virtual town hall on Monday to talk about the state of abortion in Texas.
They will be public questions, which people can submit by clicking here.
The town hall will be live streamed on the THDC Facebook page starting at 5:30 p.m.
Local
The latest news from around North Texas.
The president said he lacks the power to force the dozen-plus states with strict restrictions or outright bans on abortion to allow the procedure.
“I don’t have the authority to say that we’re going to reinstate Roe v. Wade as the law of the land,” he said, referring to the Supreme Court's decision from 1973 that had established a national right to abortion.
Biden said Congress would have to codify that right and for that to have a better chance in the future, voters would have to elect more lawmakers who support abortion access.
He encouraged people to continue speaking out.
"Keep protesting, because keep making your point. It's critically important. We can do a lot of things to accommodate the rights of women in the meantime, fundamentally, the only thing that's going to change this is if we have a national law that reinstates Roe v. Wade,” he said.
People are doing just that. Marches and rallies took place across the country on both sides of the debate over the weekend.
Huge groups of protesters for and against abortion rights gathered in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Miami.
In Chicago, there was a March for Life rally and in Washington D.C., abortion supporters held a sit-in outside of the White House.
