President Joe Biden will deliver a speech in Florida on Tuesday denouncing the state’s new six-week abortion ban and other efforts to restrict abortion access across the country, according to Biden campaign aides who shared details of the trip first with NBC News.
At the event, which is scheduled to take place in Tampa about one week before the state law is set to go into effect, the president will talk about “the stakes of this election for reproductive freedom across the entire country.”
Biden will also tie Florida’s restrictions on the procedure to other consequences of Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022, including the Arizona state Supreme Court decision last week that upheld a near-total abortion ban dating from 1864, according to the aides.
“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 event is significant for Biden: While voicing full support for abortion access, he has often looked to Vice President Kamala Harris to be the administration’s most prominent voice on the issue. 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.
On Tuesday, though, Biden will take center stage on the issue. The president is expected to attack Trump for saying he is proud of appointing the Supreme Court justices who made overturning Roe v. Wade possible, as well as for other comments related to recently enacted state abortion bans. Biden is also expected to say that if re-elected, Trump and his allies will enact a federal abortion ban, though Trump has recently claimed that he would not do so, saying instead that he wanted the issue left to the states.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris campaign has been hammering Republicans as more and more states restrict abortion. The campaign has rolled out emotional ads focused on the issue and has used women affected by the abortion restrictions as campaign surrogates across the country.
Biden’s trip to Tampa is part of the campaign’s broader effort to nationalize the fallout and the conversation around state abortion bans. 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.
