Biden condemns Idaho school denying students access to contraception

President Joe Biden criticized University of Idaho officials for their new advice that students should not be given birth control due to the state’s near-total abortion rate.

“People, what century are we living in?” Biden said Tuesday at a meeting of his reproductive task force at the White House. ‘I mean, what are we doing? I respect everyone’s opinion on the personal decisions they make, but my Lord, we are talking about contraception here. It shouldn’t be so controversial.’

He also went after officials in Arizona who denied a 14-year-old girl her medication to manage her rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, because the drug can also cause an abortion.

“This 14-year-old girl couldn’t get the medicine she needed for arthritis because of the extremely backward and misguided law,” Biden said.

Biden used the examples from both states to criticize Republicans for introducing “extreme” laws that affect birth control and prescriptions.

“We’re not going to stand by and let Republicans across the country adopt extreme policies to threaten access to basic health care,” he vowed.

In Tucson, Arizona, Emma Thompson, a teenage girl who was not pregnant, was originally refused her prescription for methotrexate before the pharmacy finally agreed to fill it. Methotrexate can also be used to terminate an ectopic pregnancy.

Both Thompson’s parents and the pediatrician had to intervene to get her prescription filled. The incident came after Arizona revived a law criminalizing nearly all abortions.

And last week, the University of Idaho told faculty and staff not to even discuss workplace abortion because they could face a felony conviction and be permanently banned from all future jobs with the state.

Idaho, in the wake of the Roe vs. Wade passed by the Supreme Court a law prohibiting abortion anytime after conception, except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is in danger or in cases of rape or incest as long as the crime was reported to the police.

University officials interpreted this as a sign that they were not allowed to offer contraception to students.

Biden at the White House on Tuesday pleaded with other schools in states with restrictive abortion laws not to follow suit.

“My message to other colleagues consider enacting a policy like this: don’t, please don’t,” he said.

The president marked 100 days since the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade by criticizing states that have curtailed abortion rights and announcing $6 million in health care funding.

Biden, with Vice President Kamala Harris by his side, also announced new guidelines for universities from the Department of Education to protect students from discrimination based on pregnancy and $6 million in new grants from the Department of Health and Human Services to access to reproductive health care.

October 2 marks 100 days since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling returned the issue of abortion rights to states.

Since then, 13 states have made abortion illegal and eight have passed laws to protect abortion rights, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

And nearly 30 million women of childbearing age now live in a state with a ban — including nearly 22 million women who can’t access abortion care after six weeks, before most women know they’re pregnant, the White House noted.

Democrats are trying to mobilize their voters on the abortion issue ahead of the November election that will determine control of Congress.

Government officials have repeatedly gone after Republicans on the issue.

In particular, Biden has raised the abortion issue on the campaign trail, reminding women of their power at the polls and calling on them to vote.

Specifically, in a report by Jennifer Klein, the director of Biden’s Gender Policy Council, released by the White House, the administration says that Republicans have blocked efforts to introduce reproductive protection into federal law and that “Republican elected officials on state and national levels have taken extreme measures to block women’s access to health care.”

“In 100 days, millions of women will not have access to critical health care and doctors and nurses will be criminally punished for providing health care,” Klein notes.

Klein also specifically calls on Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to introduce “a national abortion ban that threatens to put doctors in jail for performing an abortion to save the health of their patients, for offering a full range of miscarriage care, or for providing an abortion to a woman carrying a fetus with little to no chance of survival.”

Biden has wielded his executive pen in the wake of the court ruling, but his administration has repeatedly stressed that the best way to protect abortion rights is for Congress to legislate it.

However, in the 50-50 evenly split Senate, there is not enough support to get such a bill above the 60 votes needed to move legislation forward.

Meanwhile, no state has taken Biden up on his offer to use Medicaid to cover the costs for people crossing state lines for abortions.

Two months ago, Biden signed an executive order encouraging states to use Medicaid to expand access to abortion.

But no state has applied to do so, Politics revealed.

The news station contacted 24 states where abortion rights are not at risk and found that officials in 10 states said they were reviewing the federal proposal; Massachusetts and Minnesota await additional federal guidance; North Carolina does not enforce the policy; and 11 states did not respond to requests for comment.