It was a new era in Washington in 1981, and abortion rights activists were terrified.
With an anti-abortion president, Ronald Reagan, in power and Republicans controlling the Senate for the first time in decades, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that had made abortion legal nationwide several years earlier.
The amendment — which the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights” — cleared a key hurdle in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982. Support came not only from Republicans but from a 39-year-old, second-term Democrat: Joe Biden.
“I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background,” Biden, a Roman Catholic, said at the time. The decision, he said, was “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.”
The bill never made it to the full Senate, and when it came back up the following year, Biden voted against it. His back-and-forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career.
As Biden prepares for the possibility of a third presidential run, women’s rights leaders and activists in both parties are recalling these shifts on abortion, which are likely to draw fresh scrutiny in a Democratic primary race where women are expected to make up a majority of voters.
Biden entered the Senate in 1973 as a 30-year-old practicing Catholic who soon concluded that the Supreme Court went “too far” on abortion rights in the Roe case. He told an interviewer the following year that a woman shouldn’t have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.” By the time he left the vice president’s mansion in early 2017, he was a 74-year-old who argued a far different view: that government doesn’t have “a right to tell other people that women, they can’t control their body,” as he put it in 2012.
Abortion has long been a difficult issue for Catholic Democrats and leaders including former Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. Many Catholic Democrats in government have cited their faith in explaining their personal opposition to abortion while taking stands to support abortion rights — and, in some cases, also holding positions in favor of some abortion restrictions. A Pew Research Center poll last fall showed Catholics divided on whether abortion should be legal.
But some of Biden’s more moderate-to-conservative stances in his legislative record are raising questions in the party about whether he could win over an ascendant liberal wing eager to impose purity tests around issues of race and gender in 2020.
Even before announcing a candidacy, Biden has started trying to rebut those concerns, telling party officials in Delaware this month that he has “the most progressive record” of anyone running for president.
But the issue of abortion poses particularly challenging terrain for Biden. Efforts to restrict access to abortion by the Trump administration, and the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, have heightened concerns among many Democrats that federal protections of abortion rights could be chipped away or eventually overturned — and that the next president needs to be a dependable ally on abortion issues.
“Anxiety is super high among women across the country,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of the abortion rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Joe Biden is trying to carve out a space for himself as the middle, moderate candidate, and he’s going to have to really get with the times and understand that standing with abortion rights is the middle, moderate position.”
She added, “I can’t tell you if he’s there or not.”
Biden is already facing criticism from some women’s rights activists over his aggressive questioning of Anita Hill during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas in 1991. Biden’s comment Tuesday that he wished he “could have done something” to give Hill’s claims of sexual harassment a more respectful hearing drew fierce backlash from critics, who pointed out that Biden was chairman of the Senate committee that questioned Hill. Some women’s rights leaders say Biden must offer a stronger and more personal apology to Hill, as well as clarify his views on a broad range of issues including sexual assault, harassment and Republicans’ efforts to limit abortion access. (Biden has spoken warmly about some Republicans and bipartisanship in recent months.)
Biden declined to be interviewed for this article. His spokesman, Bill Russo, said the former vice president is a supporter of the Roe decision who fought to protect abortion rights by mounting a fierce opposition to the nomination of a conservative judge, Robert H. Bork, to the Supreme Court in 1987.
“Because of that, Roe and its progeny have been preserved for 30 years. But for that effort, Roe v. Wade would not be the law of the land today,” Russo said.
Russo declined to detail Biden’s current views on specific policies he once supported, including banning all federal funding for abortion services and research.
What is clear from a review of Biden’s record in the Senate, his public statements as vice president and interviews about his comments in private meetings is that his position on abortion grew more liberal over his four decades in federal office.
“I’m prepared to accept that at the moment of conception there’s human life and being, but I’m not prepared to say that to other God-fearing, non-God-fearing people that have a different view,” he told the Catholic magazine America in 2015.
Biden has cast his evolution as a matter of wrestling with the teachings of his faith. But his shifting views also reflect a political calculation about the changing mores of his party in the 1980s and 1990s, when many moderate Democratic leaders, including Al Gore and Bill Clinton, altered their skeptical positions on abortion. Clinton, for one, sought to stake out a center-left position by saying abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
Today, every candidate in the 2020 field supports abortion rights, with a dozen boasting a perfect score card from NARAL Pro-Choice America.
“The benevolent reinvention of Joe Biden is what’s unfolding,” said the Rev. Derrick Harkins, the former head of religious outreach for the Democratic National Committee, who was once criticized for what some party activists saw as conservative views on abortion. “His perspectives around a number of issues over the years were reflective of a different context and maybe even, if you will, a different time.”
In interviews during his first decades in the Senate, Biden said he supported the right to an abortion but opposed federal funding to pay for it. That position was shared by Gore and other Democrats who wanted to support abortion rights but were uncomfortable making taxpayers who were anti-abortion pay for it.
As Biden put it to United Press International in 1986, “If it’s not government’s business, then you have to accept the whole of that concept, which means you don’t proscribe your right to have an abortion and you don’t take your money to assist someone else to have an abortion.”
In the 1980s, he repeatedly voted against funding abortions as part of the health care plan provided to federal employees and in federal prisons, except in cases where it was medically necessarily for the mother.
In 1981, he crafted the Biden amendment to ban the use of foreign aid for biomedical research related to abortion. He repeatedly voted for the so-called Hyde amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion, including through Medicaid. Both policies remain in place today, despite efforts by Democrats to end the ban on the use of federal funds.
In 1984, Biden supported an amendment praising the Reagan administration’s “Mexico City policy,” which banned federal funding for organizations around the world that provide abortion counseling or referrals. In 2005, he voted against it, supporting an amendment that would have nullified President George W. Bush’s reinstatement of the policy.
A voter guide put out in 1987 by two abortion rights groups described Biden as having an “erratic” record on reproductive rights, writing that he had a “mixed voting and rhetorical record on the issue of whether women should have the right to choose an abortion.”
“Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us,” Jeannie Rosoff, a founder of the abortion rights research organization Guttmacher Institute, told The Wall Street Journal as Biden weighed whether to enter the 1988 presidential race. “It’s very difficult to know whether this issue is purely personal, purely political or a combination of both with him.”
At the time, opponents of abortion rights say they saw him much the same way as liberals: “Unreliable,” said Marilyn Musgrave, a former Republican congresswoman from Colorado and current vice president of government affairs for the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group.
“I don’t believe he’s made a public statement recently about funding, so I don’t know where he really stands on that now,” Musgrave said. “Perhaps he evolved on that also.”
Aides to Biden declined to say whether he still supports those specific policies.
As the years went on, abortion rights advocates recall, Biden spoke passionately in meetings about how his religious beliefs shaped his views on abortion. And they, with equal emotion, worked to reframe the issue as a matter of trusting women and their doctors to manage their health care.
“Biden’s struggle was genuine and heartfelt,” said Kristina Kiehl, an abortion rights activist who met with Biden during the 1980s and 1990s. “And I think we were very helpful in kind of guiding him into how this is OK and it’s the right thing to do.”
As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, Biden drew praise from supporters of abortion rights for sharply questioning Bork about his opposition to a ruling that struck down birth control bans. In Congress, Biden repeatedly voted to give access to abortion services for members of the military, and in 1994 he voted to establish fines and penalties for barring access to abortion clinics. In interviews and congressional votes, he defended the Roe ruling.
But at other times, he sided with Republicans and conservative Democrats who were trying to limit abortion access.
When Republicans began introducing legislation in the 1990s that would outlaw a rare abortion procedure they termed “partial-birth abortion,” Biden emerged as a reliable ally. He voted for the ban, and then against efforts by Clinton to veto the legislation in 1996 and 1998.
Those proposals did not prohibit a wide enough range of procedures, he argued in a speech on the Senate floor in 1997.
“It did not, as I would have liked, ban all post-viability abortions,” he said, backing a proposal by Sen. Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader from South Dakota, that would include an exception if the mother’s health was at risk. “I was and still am concerned that in banning on partial-birth abortions, we do not go far enough.”
In 2003, he backed a third ban that included no exception for the health of the mother, sponsored by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. That law moved through the courts for several years before being upheld by the Supreme Court in April 2007.
By that point in his career, Biden was running for president for a second time against Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom had voted against bans of the procedure. Biden cast himself as a strong supporter of abortion rights and criticized the court’s ruling as “paternalistic,” worrying that it could be a step toward overturning Roe.
“I was 29 years old when I came to the U.S. Senate, and I have learned a lot,” he said in a 2007 interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Look, I’m a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility.”
When Barack Obama picked him as vice president more than a year later, some abortion rights advocates worried about Biden’s record. But they felt confident that Obama’s more liberal views on the issue would prevail, recalled Kate Michelman, a former leader of NARAL.
“Joe Biden continued his evolution on the issue under Obama. He got there,” she said. “I can’t say for absolute, 100 percent, but I would trust him as president to protect and defend a women’s right to choose.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.