Biden: ‘It's a sad day for the court and for the country’

President Joe Biden on Friday called the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade a “sad day for the court and for the country” and called on Congress to restore abortion rights protections.

“Now with Roe gone, let’s be very clear: The health and life of women of this nation are now at risk,” he stated, speaking from the White House. He called it, “a tragic error by the Supreme Court in my view.”

The White House had been quietly preparing for this moment for months. It began when the Supreme Court took the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case and accelerated dramatically with the early May leak of a draft opinion that signaled the court was ready to overturn Roe. Aides prepared for a variety of outcomes, including the possibility that Chief Justice John Roberts would be able to broker some sort of compromise that would at least partially leave Roe intact.

But a decision to gut the ruling was always viewed as the most likely, and West Wing staff began having multiple meetings a week to try to game plan a response, recognizing that such a decision would set off a political firestorm, one filled with both peril and opportunity for Biden.

The news broke a day before Biden was set to travel to the G-7 summit in Germany, thousands of miles away from Washington. And it created the specter of a president heading overseas to deal with foreign entanglements while massive political tectonic shifts were happening back home. The president said no executive actions could fill the abortion rights void left by the Court’s decision.

"The court has done what it has never done before: expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans that had already been recognized," said Biden.