Biden's 50-year journey as a skeptic of Roe v. Wade to its ultimate protector

Abortion is at the center of President Joe Biden's re-election campaign — an improbability for a politician who long expressed his personal discomfort with the practice.

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Standing outside Joe Biden’s church in this seaside town, the Rev. William Cocco mulls a question the president has grappled with over his long political career: How does a practicing Catholic defy church teaching and come out in favor of abortion rights, as Biden has done?

“I think it’s very difficult to reconcile that,” Cocco said in an interview this month after he presided over a service at St. Edmond Roman Catholic Church. “Life is a gift from God.”

Biden would have been at Mass that day, lining up for communion with the other parishioners, but he hurried back from his vacation home for meetings about Iranian plans to attack Israel.

An irony of Biden’s final campaign is that one of the most vexing issues he has ever confronted personally — abortion — is now central to his political survival. Biden’s campaign and his entire party have made abortion a defining issue in his re-election bid, hoping to rally female voters alarmed by Republican efforts to roll back reproductive freedoms.

The young Catholic politician who once said the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that safeguarded abortion rights “went too far” — and who to this day remains uneasy with the procedure — is casting himself as the only thing standing between women and strict national abortion bans.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/bidens-roe-v-wade-abortion-rcna147021

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