US President Joe Biden promised to “support the rights of women and girls in all aspects of our domestic and foreign policy”, without explicitly mentioning the crucial issue of the right to abortion in the US, reported France Presse.
International Women’s Day “honors a truth we recognize every day: women and girls are essential to the success and progress of all aspects of our societies,” the US president wrote on March 8. “In too many parts of the world, the rights of women and girls are under attack,” he said, citing Afghanistan, Iran and the Russian military’s “use of rape as a weapon of war” in Ukraine as examples.
The U.S. Treasury Department today announced new sanctions against entities and individuals in Iran, specifically two Iranian prison officials accused of human rights abuses against women and girls in a country rocked by an unprecedented protest movement.
Joe Biden also pledged to work “everywhere in the world” to “protect access to health care, including reproductive health care” and to “preserve women’s political participation.”
As for his own country, the US president did not specifically mention the right to abortion, which is under threat because the Supreme Court challenged its enshrinement in the constitution, leading many states to limit or simply eliminate access to termination of pregnancy. However, Biden mentioned the “investments” made in the US in favor of families and working women, and a law designed to combat violence against women in the family, BTA reported.
The Democratic president, lacking a majority in Congress, doesn’t really have the leverage to oppose conservatives’ anti-abortion initiatives. Authorities in the state of Florida introduced a bill yesterday that would ban abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, and all American women’s access to abortion pills, used in the majority of terminations of pregnancies in the United States, is currently suspended by a judge in Texas.
