There are several reasons why First Lady Jill Biden’s guest to the State Of the Union speech may not go over well.
The White House announced:
“On Sunday, the President and the First Lady spoke to Kate Cox, who was forced to go to court to seek permission for the care she needed for a nonviable pregnancy that threatened her life. They thanked her for her courage in sharing her story and speaking out about the impact of the extreme abortion ban in Texas,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
“The first lady invited Kate to join her as a guest at the State of the Union and Kate accepted, so those are ways that you’re going to hear the president lift up those very personal stories,” the press secretary said.
“Her story is incredibly powerful, devastating,” said White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre in a press briefing Wednesday. “And it speaks to the moment that we are in now, when we talk about women having the right to make these deeply personal decisions about their health care that was taken away by the Supreme Court.”
According to media reports, Cox had received a diagnosis that her baby would not survive childbirth and her pregnancy was a threat to her health.
From the Texas Tribune:
[Cox] learned after an anatomy scan that her much-wanted pregnancy was non-viable. Her fetus would not survive after birth and, according to Cox’s lawsuit, continuing the pregnancy posed a threat to her health. Cox went to the emergency room four times in a month after receiving the lethal fetal diagnosis.
An Austin judge sided with Cox, ruling that she should be allowed to have an abortion. The Supreme Court of Texas put the ruling on hold temporarily, during which time Cox traveled out of state to terminate her pregnancy. Soon after, the Supreme Court of Texas ruled against Cox, saying she would not have qualified to have an abortion under the medical exception to the state’s abortion laws.
There are a few reasons Cox being a guest may not go over well.
First, I have to wonder if the GOP is smart enough to do this. Biden and Democrats controlled everything in 2021 and could have codified pro-choice health issues, but they didn’t. Kamala Harris was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate; the Dems could have passed anything they wanted.
Aside from the activists, this is a really private, sensitive issue, and it may not go over well.
Recently, the Biden campaign launched a Facebook ad campaign fearing Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dalla OBGYN mother of three, who also left Texas to get an abortion diagnosed with anencephaly, a condition where a baby is born without parts of the brain and skull.
In her court testimony, Dennard acknowledged that her pregnancy had not made her “critically ill.”
“I was not hemorrhaging, I was not septic. I was pregnant with a lethal anomaly, and I did not believe that I would be able to receive an abortion in my state at that time for the sole purpose of my lethal anomaly,” Dennard said.
