Joe Biden signs executive order to protect women's abortion rights in US
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Terming the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the right to abortion as an exercise in "raw political power," US president Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order to help protect access to services to terminate pregnancies, Reuters reported.
"What we're witnessing wasn't a constitutional judgment, it was an exercise in raw political power," Biden told reporters at the White House after quoting heavily from the dissenting opinion in the ruling.
According to a White House factsheet, Biden has asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services to take action and submit a report, within 30 days, on a set of measures to protect reproductive services.
These include protecting and expanding access to abortion care, particularly medication; ensuring emergency medical care including by updating guidelines to clarify a physician's responsibility; expanding access to emergency contraception and long-acting reversible contraception like intrauterine devices; launching public education efforts; and working with lawyers to ensure "robust legal representation of patients, providers, and third parties lawfully seeking or offering reproductive health care services throughout the country", including the right to travel outside the state to seek abortion.
Biden's second broad set of measures relate to protecting patient privacy. These include addressing "the transfer and sales of sensitive health-related data, combatting digital surveillance related to reproductive health care services, and protecting people seeking reproductive health care from inaccurate information, fraudulent schemes, or deceptive practices".
Biden, a Democrat, has been under pressure from his own party to take action after the landmark decision last month to overturn Roe v Wade, which upended roughly 50 years of protections for women's reproductive rights.
In Friday's speech, Biden instead laid out how abortion rights could be secured by voters if they elected more pro-choice senators, and noted the Supreme Court majority opinion referred to women's "political power."