It wasn’t until 2019, while running for president of the United States, that Joe Biden decided it was no longer expedient to support the Hyde Amendment, which for forty-plus years had not only saved countless children from abortion but had spared taxpayers from having to pay for it all. At the time, he had been one of only a few remaining Democratic politicians determined to hold the line.

In fact, as far back as 1973, on his arrival in Washington as a freshman Senator from Delaware, the year in which the Supreme Court first opened the floodgates, he had spoken out against abortion, condemning the sheer overreach of the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Indeed, within a few short years he would actually vote in favor of a constitutional amendment allowing states to overturn it. “The single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. Senator,” he later called it.

Alas, a brief profile in courage. In the following year, Biden would vote against the measure, on the grounds that it amounted to a bit of an overreach itself. He has not looked back since. The Broker: A Novel Grisham, John Best Price: $1.49 Buy New $3.97 (as of 08:21 UTC - Details)

Meanwhile, as we approach yet another presidential election, the question of where Biden stands on the life issue hardly matters at all now that his running mate, Kamala Harris, has come forward to spearhead the effort to keep abortion alive and well. She has gone from one battleground state to another, on what she calls her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour, to ensure that nothing gets in the way of unlimited access to abortion services. Not even good taste, it would seem.

Just last week, while finishing up in Minnesota, one of a number of hotly contested states, she visited a Planned Parenthood Clinic in St. Paul where, presumably, abortions were taking place even as she announced her full-throated support for the practice. It was clearly a first. Not even Joe Biden, for all the ardor of his approval, would have ventured into the actual killing field. Call it a residue of his Catholic upbringing, if you like, but he sedulously refuses to use the word, so instinctively does he recoil from the barbarity of what it means. Even when delivering the State of the Union he somehow managed to check his enthusiasm, again falling short of using the word.

All right, so the guy’s a fraud and a hypocrite. What else is new? But Madam Vice President? She has thrown all caution to the wind. Not only will she proudly proclaim the right of any woman at any time to terminate the life of her child; she will even go into an abortion clinic in order to proclaim it as a constitutionally-protected right. It is nothing short of sacred, she will insist. Rather as if John C. Calhoun, who had been himself a vice president, honorably serving in the years leading up to the Civil War, were to carry his campaign into the Slave Markets of the American South in order to shore up support for the rights of plantation owners to buy and sell Africans. How Alexander Hamilton... Brion McClanahan Best Price: $4.09 Buy New $5.99 (as of 06:55 UTC - Details)

Whether one agrees with Calhoun or not, I think it obvious that no pro-slavery politician, even the most odious, would have wanted to be seen soliciting votes in a place where human beings are bought and sold. Any more than a German politician, loyal to the Third Reich, would stage a campaign rally outside a concentration camp in order to recruit support among voters partial to genocide.

But Kamala feels no inhibition on the matter at all. In fact, she has argued, she needs precisely to be there. Where else can her solidarity for victims of fetal oppression be more convincingly, more dramatically, shown? It is, after all, the perfect setting for giving voice, both loud and repeated, to the rights of the uterus, a word she especially likes to fondle, lest its political significance be lost. “That part of the body,” she instructs us, “that needs a lot of medical care from time to time.”

Yes, and for some—i.e., those burdened by babies they do not want—it may need from time to time to be most thoroughly flushed out lest all that unwelcome tissue somehow survive the procedure. Is this to become the new paradigm in feminist care, I wonder, that concern for an always empty uterus be uppermost among the medical professionals? How lucky for women these days to have so passionate—and powerful—an advocate on their side as Biden’s vice president. No sharper tip of a spear with which to annihilate the enemies of pro-choice America can be imagined.

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