Simply days after the Alabama Supreme Courtroom dominated that frozen embryos could be thought of “kids,” President Biden held a fundraiser at a number one stem cell analysis advocate’s Silicon Valley residence, warning that voting for Donald Trump would restrict reproductive rights past abortion.
“Trump and his MAGA buddies are decided to remove your elementary freedoms,” Biden mentioned at a small occasion on Thursday held on the residence of actual property builders Bob Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein.
Klein was the chief of Proposition 71, a California poll measure accredited by voters in 2004 that ensured state funding for stem cell analysis to help medical discoveries and cures to ailments. The measure got here after former Republican President George W. Bush had restricted federal funding for the analysis amid moral considerations from spiritual conservatives concerning the destruction of human embryos that provide the cells.
Biden’s go to to Klein’s residence within the prosperous city of Los Altos Hills comes because the Alabama court docket choice has stalled in vitro fertilization therapies, often known as IVF, leaving some sufferers there who had hoped to conceive kids by means of the process scrambling. The follow entails combining sperm and eggs in a lab to create embryos and implanting them in a uterus.
The Alabama court docket choice — which mentioned those that destroy frozen embryos could be held responsible for wrongful dying — has sparked new considerations about reproductive well being entry amid abortion uncertainty after the 2022 U.S. Supreme Courtroom choice to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the historic choice that protected abortion rights nationwide.
The difficulty has reignited partisan moral debates over the medical makes use of of stem cells, with Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley saying this week that she believes that “embryos are infants.”
At Thursday’s occasion, Biden doubled down on his promise to veto any nationwide abortion ban proposed by Congress and mentioned if he’s reelected — and Democrats achieve congressional management in November — his administration can undo the far-reaching rollbacks of reproductive rights.
“I promise you we are going to totally restore Roe v. Wade,” Biden mentioned to applause.
When Vice President Kamala Harris visited San Jose final month, she additionally hammered the necessity for voters to place Democrats in cost to keep away from a nationwide abortion ban.
Trump has taken credit score for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, made potential by his appointments to the excessive court docket, and the New York Occasions reported this week that if he’s elected, he plans to take that even additional, concentrating on abortion tablet entry.
“All of those rights and all of this progress is at an actual danger of loss if Joe Biden just isn’t reelected,” Klein mentioned Thursday, pointing to IVF, abortion, most cancers analysis and progress on reducing the price of lifesaving prescriptions.
Steve Westley, the previous state controller of California who unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Democrat in 2006, additionally co-hosted the Bay Space occasion, held in a secluded residential space close to Santa Clara, the place horses and donkeys roamed neighbors’ yards.
Tickets to the occasion value between $6,600 and $100,000. Attendees included Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a Democrat, and TV journalist Katie Couric, who’s an advocate for pancreatic most cancers analysis.
Biden, who has been in California since Tuesday, stopping at fundraisers in Los Angeles and San Francisco, was headed again to the White Home on Thursday, the place state leaders, together with Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been awaiting his arrival for the Nationwide Governors Assn. winter assembly.
Nodding to criticisms about his capacity to serve one other time period at his age, Biden, 81, shared a typical chorus on the marketing campaign path to match him to the choice, not “the almighty.”
“I’m not the present of all presidents however I’m certain as hell higher than the final man.”