While presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and baptized Catholic Joe Biden once spoke of abortion as being “always a tragedy” and has stated that he personally believes “on faith” that “life begins at conception,” this week he nevertheless became the chosen candidate for the nation’s largest abortion provider and received Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s official endorsement. Biden said that he was “proud” to accept the endorsement of a group that stopped the beating hearts of 345,672 pre-born children this past year, capping off his campaign’s increased embrace of the abortion movement.

In a statement, Planned Parenthood’s acting president Alexis McGill Johnson touts Biden’s abortion credentials. “When he left the Senate, Vice President Joe Biden had a 100% voting record from Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and has been clear he is ‘100% for sexual and reproductive health,’” she noted. “And we are going to hold him to that.”

Biden’s Senate career has come a long way since his statements when it began in 1973 that the Supreme Court had gone “too far” on abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision and in 1974 that a woman shouldn’t have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.” His 1981 Biden amendment prohibited foreign-aid funding from going to biomedical research involving abortion. His stance evolved on the issue by the time he left the Senate in 2009, as Planned Parenthood proudly noted.

When he finished his time as vice president, he had received multiple corrections from U.S. bishops due to his public support of abortion. However, Biden did maintain his opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion and supported the Hyde Amendment. In a letter to constituents in 1994, he wrote, “those of us who are opposed to abortions should not be compelled to pay for them.”

Well, that understanding of the conscientious objections of the majority of Americans — still 60% of American voters in 2020 — who don’t want their money to fund abortion fell by the wayside last June when he abruptly reversed his stance saying, “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code.”

Planned Parenthood highlighted this in their endorsement, clearly an important point for abortion advocates who might question the former vice president’s total embrace of their agenda. “Vice President Biden has also publicly committed multiple times — including at Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s We Decide member forum last June, and more recently in the Democratic presidential debate this past March — to repeal the harmful Hyde Amendment,” the statement emphasized.

NPR asked McGill Johnson about Biden’s record on the abortion issue and she replied that abortion advocates have ultimately found what they needed in Biden. "What we know is that he's somebody that folks can work with,” McGill Johnson said. “We know that he will deliver on basic — I mean birth control, access to abortion — these are actually bread-and-butter issues, and I think that's what we really need right now."

Pro-life advocates called the endorsement unsurprising in some ways. “Joe Biden has spent his entire campaign pandering to the radical abortion lobby. His endorsement by Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion business, comes as no surprise,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, SBA List President and National Co-Chair of Pro-Life Voices for Trump. “When Joe Biden flip-flopped on the Hyde Amendment, the Democratic Party’s capitulation to extremism was complete. Now he supports taxpayer-funded abortion on demand through the moment of birth and vows to stack the Supreme Court with pro-abortion justices who will serve life terms.”

Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, emphasized that “those who really care about protecting life realize that the election of Planned Parenthood-endorsed candidate, Joe Biden, will result in a major increase of tax dollars going to the billion-dollar organization, including direct payment for abortions, among other deadly consequences."

"This is literally a life and death election," Planned Parenthood head McGill Johnson told NPR. "We felt like we can't endure another four years of Trump; we have to do everything we can to get him out of office."

In this “life and death” election, Biden has chosen to embrace a group whose sole focus is to terminate lives which he has stated he believes “begin at conception,” even if it is just “on faith” and not on the clear science. As the 2020 presidential election heats up, it remains to be seen how vocally the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will respond to a U.S. presidential candidate and baptized Catholic, who so publicly opposes such a central tenet of Catholic moral teaching.