Minutes after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, a group of West Wing aides raced to the Oval Office to brief President Joe Biden on the decision. As they drafted a speech, Biden was the first person in the room to say what has been his administration’s rallying cry ever since.

“He said at that time, ‘The only thing that will actually restore the rights that were just taken away are to pass federal legislation,’” Jen Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, recalled in an interview.

But if the prospect of codifying Roe’s protections in Congress seemed like a long shot a year ago, it is all but impossible to imagine now, with an ascendant far-Right bloc in the House and a slim Democratic majority in the Senate.

Instead, with the battle over abortion rights turning squarely to individual states, officials in the Biden administration are working with a limited set of tools, including executive orders and the galvanising power of the presidency, to argue that Republicans running in next year’s elections would impose even further restrictions on abortion.

“Make no mistake, this election is about freedom on the ballot,” Biden said on Friday at a Democratic National Committee event, where he collected the endorsements of several abortion-rights groups.

Vice-President Kamala Harris will deliver a speech in North Carolina marking the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years. Klein, who recalled refreshing news websites on the day the decision came down last June, said that she was “shocked but not surprised” by the court’s ruling.

New York Times News Service