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WASHINGTON -- President Biden urged Congress Tuesday to pass a law codifying a woman's right to an abortion, and also raised concerns about the effects that state abortion bans were having on women's healthcare.

"The [Supreme] Court got Roe right 50 years ago, and the Congress should codify the protections of Roe and do it once and for all," Biden said in the State Dining Room of the White House during the second meeting of the administration's Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access. "But right now, we're short a handful of votes. The only way it's going to happen is if the American people make it happen."

He noted that congressional Republicans are proposing a national abortion ban. "Let me be clear what that means," Biden said. "It means that even if you live in a state where extremist Republican officials aren't running the show, your right to choose will still be at risk, because Republicans in Congress want to pass a law to take away the right to choose for every woman in every state, in every county."

The meeting highlighted two announcements the administration made Tuesday on the topic. First, the Department of Education issued reminding universities that they cannot discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, including for pregnancy termination. Second, HHS will in new Title X grants and other grants "to protect and expand access to reproductive health care and improve service delivery, promote the adoption of healthy behaviors, and reduce existing health disparities," the task force noted in a report to Biden and Vice President Harris.

The report analyzed the reproductive healthcare landscape now that 100 days have passed since the Supreme Court's June 24th ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. During that 100 days, "abortion bans have gone into effect in more than a dozen states, most of which ban abortion from the moment of fertilization and do not provide exceptions for rape or incest," the report said. In addition, "close to 30 million women of reproductive age now live in a state with a ban -- including nearly 22 million women who cannot access abortion care after 6 weeks, before most women know they are pregnant."

In the meantime, the president said, some states have passed abortion bans or severe restrictions on the procedure. "In Arizona they had a law in 1864 -- during the Civil War -- it went into effect again a week and a half ago. Two days after it went into effect, a 14-year-old girl suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis couldn't get a refill for her prescription because of concern it could be used to terminate a pregnancy, in violation of a law in that state. That's exactly what we were afraid could happen."

Biden also decried an announcement by University of Idaho officials that they will stop providing contraception to students. "In fact, they told the university staff that they could get in trouble just for talking or telling students about where they could get birth control," he said. "Folks, what century are we in? ... Lord, we're talking about contraception; it shouldn't be that controversial."

Task force members also heard from ob/gyns who have been affected by the Dobbs decision. The decision "has wreaked havoc across this country, as states including Georgia have severe abortion bans in effect, and have threatened clinicians with criminal penalties because of the law that is not based in medicine or science," said Nisha Verma, MD, an ob/gyn in Atlanta.

"I am forced to turn away patients that I know how to care for," she said. "I have had teenagers with chronic medical conditions that make their pregnancy very high risk, and women with highly desired pregnancies who receive a terrible diagnosis of a fetal anomaly cry when they learned that they can't receive their abortion in our state, and beg me to help them. Imagine looking someone in the eye and saying, 'I have all the skills and the tools to help you. But our state's politicians have told me I can't.'"

Kristin Lyerly, MD, an ob/gyn in Green Bay, Wisconsin, said she had to stop providing abortions at a Sheboygan abortion clinic -- one of four such clinics in the state -- after the Dobbs decision. A law now in effect in Wisconsin "makes it a felony for me to provide abortion care to my patients," she said. "There are no exceptions for rape, and no exceptions for incest. The only exception is for the life of the mother. The pregnant people don't have a warning light that comes on when they've crossed that threshold. You have to use our clinical judgment developed through over a decade of formal education, experience, and commitment to make those kinds of sensitive individualized decisions."

"So in places like Sheboygan County, where the district attorney has specifically said that he will prosecute physicians, can I count on him to trust my clinical judgment?" said Lyerly. "Looking back, would we agree that I met the criteria that my patient was sick enough? The effect is chilling."

In addition, "people in our state are being denied medication for miscarriage management," Lyerly said. "They are being denied treatment in emergency departments while actively bleeding, presumably because the treatment for a miscarriage is essentially the same as the medication or procedure that can terminate an early pregnancy."

And there is one other effect to consider, she said: "With physician burnout at an all-time high and a number of physicians leaving the field in the wake of the pandemic, our training programs can't keep up. Medical students and residents who had planned to stay and practice in Wisconsin are now wondering whether they will receive the training that they need to take care of their patients and whether they can live and work in a state where doctors can be jailed for fulfilling their duty of care."

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