Where Joe Biden and Donald Trump Stand on Abortion

Roe v. Wade and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, affirmed a constitutional right to abortion until the fetus can survive outside the womb. Mr. Biden wants to enshrine that right in federal law now that the Supreme Court has overturned it.

“Give me a Democratic House of Representatives and a bigger Democratic Senate, and we will pass a new law to restore and protect Roe v. Wade,” Mr. Biden said in January.

The congressional caveat is essential. He needs not just bare Democratic majorities but also 50 senators willing to get rid of the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.

In the absence of such majorities, Mr. Biden’s cabinet has taken some administrative actions to try to limit the effects of state abortion bans.

His Department of Health and Human Services told hospitals in 2022 that, under its interpretation, a law already on the books pertaining to emergency rooms, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, obligates doctors to perform an abortion if they believe it is needed to stabilize a patient. That guidance is subject to legal challenges on which the Supreme Court has declined to rule yet.

In April, the same department announced a rule to shield many abortion patients’ medical records from investigators and prosecutors.

Mr. Biden opposes a federal abortion ban and has said he would veto one if Congress passed it.

Mr. Biden supported restrictions on abortion when he was a senator, and he has expressed personal discomfort with it based on his Catholic faith, even as he seeks to put support for abortion rights at the heart of his re-election campaign.

“I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” he said at a fund-raiser last year, while adding, “Roe v. Wade got it right.”

In his State of the Union address this year, Mr. Biden called on Congress to protect access to in vitro fertilization.

The fertility treatment can be threatened by anti-abortion measures that treat embryos as people with legal rights, since it usually involves creating multiple embryos and destroying or indefinitely freezing unused ones. The matter gained urgency after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos were children, upending I.V.F. in the state. Mr. Biden condemned the ruling.

The Alabama Legislature subsequently passed a law that gave I.V.F. clinics immunity but did not address embryos’ legal status.

Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States are medically induced with a regimen that includes a drug called mifepristone, which anti-abortion litigants and legislators have sought to restrict since the overturning of Roe.

Mr. Biden and his administration have defended mifepristone. His solicitor general successfully urged the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit that had sought to limit access to mifepristone sharply. The court unanimously upheld access in June based on the plaintiffs’ standing; anti-abortion activists have signaled that they may try again with different plaintiffs.

“I continue to stand by F.D.A.’s evidence-based approval of mifepristone,” Mr. Biden said in a statement last year, adding that the lawsuit threatened the “F.D.A.’s medical judgment and put women’s health at risk.”

He also supported the F.D.A.’s more recent decision that allows retail pharmacies to become certified to dispense mifepristone; previously, only doctors, clinics and some mail-order pharmacies could do so. He has encouraged pharmacies to seek that certification.

In an effort to blunt the effects of state abortion bans, the Department of Health and Human Services advised pharmacists that they might violate civil rights laws if they refused to dispense drugs like mifepristone, misoprostol and methotrexate that can be used for abortions but also other medical purposes. Texas sued over this, and its lawsuit is pending.

The Justice Department also issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver abortion drugs to states with bans without violating the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits mailing materials used in abortions. Abortion opponents have expressed interest in enforcing a strict interpretation of that law.

Abortion opponents have long sought ways to cut off funding for groups — both in the United States and worldwide — that provide abortion services or referrals, primarily through “gag rules” that block foreign aid or funding from Title X, a federal grant program that supports family planning for low-income Americans.

Versions of the global rule blocking certain foreign aid, called the Mexico City policy, have been enacted by every Republican president, and rescinded by every Democratic one, since the 1980s.

Mr. Biden revoked both the global rule and the domestic one that Mr. Trump enacted.

In 2019, Mr. Biden said that he opposed the Hyde Amendment, which bans Medicaid funding for most abortions. That was a change in his longtime stance on the matter, but he has not made a major push for its repeal.

Mr. Biden has committed to accepting the results of the 2024 election and denounced Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the last one.

“For a long time, we’ve told ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed, but it’s not — we have to defend it, protect it, stand up for it, each and every one of us,” he said in Philadelphia in 2022, in one of at least four major speeches he has given on democracy. He urged Americans to “unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology.”

Mr. Biden signed reforms to the Electoral Count Act meant to prevent a repeat of Mr. Trump’s attempt to exploit the Jan. 6 proceedings to overturn his loss. The legislation — which addressed formal election certification procedures, not the storming of the Capitol — established that the vice president’s role is ceremonial and increased the number of lawmakers required to object to counting a state’s electoral votes.

Mr. Biden supported legislation to counter the type of voting restrictions that have been passed in many Republican-led states, and pushed to change the Senate filibuster to pass it, but was unable to get it through Congress. He would need majorities in both chambers and a Senate willing to eliminate or weaken the filibuster in order to revive similar legislation.

The first bill he supported, the For the People Act, would have set a floor for voting access in federal elections, meaning states could enact more inclusive procedures but not less. It would have effectively nullified ID requirements by letting voters sign affidavits instead, allowed all voters to register online and on Election Day, automatically registered people who visited agencies like the D.M.V., and restored voting rights to felons who completed their sentences.

It would also have limited gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions for House redistricting; required political action committees to report foreign contacts; more strictly regulated campaign finance, including by eliminating much of the donor anonymity allowed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling; and provided public funding to candidates who rejected private donations over $1,000.

After Republicans filibustered the For the People Act, Mr. Biden supported a narrower version called the Freedom to Vote Act, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have restored sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Supreme Court has struck down or weakened. Republicans also filibustered those.

Mr. Biden said he had never intervened and wouldn’t intervene in Justice Department prosecution decisions, according to a New York Times survey last year.

He also rescinded a Trump executive order that had sought to strip civil-service protections from career federal employees, which would have let the president fire them at will. In April, his administration finalized a rule intended to make it harder for Mr. Trump to strip those protections if he is elected again, though Mr. Trump could simply change that rule.

Mr. Biden has endorsed the Justice Department’s assessment that presidents can order “limited” military actions without congressional approval, a change from his position during an earlier presidential run in 2007. He has ordered airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias that way.

In at least one other respect, he has also used an expansive interpretation of executive power: invoking emergency power to try to cancel more than $400 billion in student debt, an effort that the Supreme Court struck down in 2023.

Inflation skyrocketed early in Mr. Biden’s term, peaking at 9.1 percent in 2022.

The pandemic kicked off rising prices around the world, as supply-chain problems escalated. Government stimulus in the United States — Mr. Trump approved more than $3 trillion in 2020 and Mr. Biden $1.9 trillion in 2021 — helped fuel demand. Other global factors, like the war in Ukraine, also played a role.

Republicans have blamed Mr. Biden’s spending, and economists have criticized the size and timing of his relief plan, which may have spurred consumer spending as global supply-chain problems persisted. But economists have also credited his rescue package with preventing the U.S. economy from sliding into recession.

The Federal Reserve, which operates independently of the White House, responded to inflation by increasing interest rates — a move that makes it more expensive to take out a mortgage or a business loan, creating a chain reaction that cools the economy.

Since 2022, inflation has slowed while the job market and consumer spending have remained robust, pointing to a potential “soft landing” in which policies return inflation to normal without creating a recession.

But the remnants of rapid inflation have been more stubborn than expected, and many Americans have registered their discontent with the prices of food and consumer goods.

Mr. Biden has overseen a significant increase in federal spending, as Mr. Trump did, though in different ways. His new spending has been targeted at industries and at low- to middle-income households, whereas Mr. Trump’s went largely to the military.

One of the first bills Mr. Biden signed was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, a stimulus package that included direct payments to most Americans, unemployment benefits, child care subsidies and funding for local governments.

He later signed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal and a $280 billion bipartisan industrial policy bill called the CHIPS and Science Act. He also championed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy tax credits and health insurance subsidies. All of the new spending measures were aimed at driving job creation, which several studies and government employment statistics indicate they did.

Mr. Biden made it so that the largest corporations have to pay at least a 15 percent tax. The rule applies to companies that report more than $1 billion in income to shareholders but had used deductions to get their federal tax bill down to little or nothing.

In a recent budget proposal, Mr. Biden called for increasing the 15 percent minimum to 21 percent. Separately, he called for partly reversing the reduction that Mr. Trump had signed to the regular corporate tax rate, which brought that rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. Here are other measures he wants to take:

• Establish a minimum tax of 25 percent for people with assets of more than $100 million

• Increase taxes on foreign profits and fuel for private jets

• Extend Trump-era tax cuts for households making less than $400,000 a year

• Widen eligibility for the earned-income tax credit

• Create a $10,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers

• Restore an expansion of the child tax credit that successfully reduced child poverty before it expired

Through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was also how he set the minimum corporate tax, Mr. Biden gave the I.R.S. more money to crack down on tax evasion.

Mr. Biden inherited an economy reeling from the pandemic: The unemployment rate was 6.4 percent when he took office — down from its peak in 2020 but high compared with other years.

Unemployment steadily declined over his first year. It fell below 4 percent in December 2021 and has stayed almost entirely below that mark for the more than two years since, fluctuating between 3.4 percent and 4 percent. Job growth has exceeded economists’ expectations.

Other indicators, including growth in gross domestic product, have also been strong, and the stock market reached record highs in the spring.

The national debt has risen steadily under Mr. Biden, by more than $6.9 trillion, continuing a long-term trend.

The deficit is more complicated: It is lower now than when Mr. Biden arrived, but that is largely a result of pandemic programs’ expiring. Setting aside the pandemic anomalies, the deficit is higher now ($1.7 trillion) than it was 2019 ($980 billion).

Initial projections from the Congressional Budget Office suggested that the Inflation Reduction Act would decrease the deficit over a decade, but use of its tax credits and subsidies appears to be higher than expected, and it could end up increasing the deficit.

Mr. Biden has largely avoided new free-trade agreements — though he did sign a deal last year with 13 Indo-Pacific countries — and he has continued elements of Mr. Trump’s protectionist policy.

He did not roll back Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, and in April he announced that he would expand them, tripling some tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum. In May, he went further, increasing tariffs on electric vehicles, solar cells, semiconductors and advanced batteries, and officially endorsing the Trump-era tariffs that he had criticized in 2020.

He scaled back the Trump administration’s tariffs on European steel and aluminum, but he has not eliminated them.

The Inflation Reduction Act created incentives for companies to keep their operations in the United States.

Mr. Biden’s administration has pushed for regulations that have a direct pocketbook effect: For instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is trying to cap credit card late fees, and the Transportation Department set a rule requiring automatic refunds when flights are canceled.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a ban on most noncompete clauses. The Labor Department has called for employers to pay overtime starting next year to people earning up to $58,656 annually, up from the current threshold of $35,568.

Mr. Biden also appointed an aggressive antitrust team and signed an executive order that called on federal agencies to help increase economic competition by scrutinizing big tech, agriculture and pharmaceutical corporations. But courts have blocked some of his efforts, including challenges to acquisitions by Microsoft and Meta. Other lawsuits are in progress: His administration is suing Apple and challenging a merger of two supermarket companies.

On his first day in office, Mr. Biden reversed many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. He suspended border-wall construction, temporarily halted most deportations and signed an executive order to “preserve and fortify” DACA, the Obama-era program that protects people brought to the United States illegally as children from being deported.

But he has since pursued stricter policies, partly because border crossings have surged to record levels, making immigration a major issue in the election, and partly because of court rulings.

He endorsed a bipartisan proposal that would have closed the border if crossings reached an average of more than 5,000 migrants a day over a week, and would also have hired thousands of new border security agents and asylum officers. The deal died in Congress after Mr. Trump came out against it.

Mr. Biden resumed construction of some sections of the border wall, saying that he didn’t believe it worked but that he had no choice because Congress had appropriated money for it. His administration waived environmental laws to expedite construction.

This year, he resumed deportation flights that carry migrants hundreds of miles from the border.

He has continued to push to preserve the DACA program, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, though judges have ruled against it, including last September. In February, he deferred deportation of Palestinians who are in the United States illegally, using executive authority to shield people whose homelands are in crisis.

In June, he also announced sweeping new protections for undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens. Those protections will shield hundreds of thousands of people from deportation and give them a path to citizenship. Separately, he made many DACA recipients eligible for employee-sponsored work visas, which could eventually open the door to permanent residency.

In June, Mr. Biden issued an executive order to close the border to asylum seekers when the seven-day average for illegal entries hits 2,500 a day. It was the most restrictive border policy enacted by any modern Democratic president, and similar to a 2018 Trump policy that was blocked by a federal judge; it will face a similar legal challenge.

Throughout his administration, Mr. Biden has kept several of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies in place, though he ended a rule that had forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings.

He initially retained Mr. Trump’s Title 42 policy, which enabled rapid expulsion of asylum seekers on public health grounds — though he did allow more than a million into the country while the policy was in place. He later sought to end it but was blocked; then it ultimately expired in 2023.

After denouncing Mr. Trump’s asylum restrictions as a candidate, Mr. Biden reinstated a version of one requiring most people seeking asylum to apply in another country first and stating that people who enter illegally are presumed to be ineligible for asylum. (A judge then blocked it.) He also proposed an additional rule to speed up asylum screenings and removals in some cases.

A bipartisan border-security deal this year, which Mr. Biden supported but Mr. Trump torpedoed, would have made it harder to claim asylum while also including a right to counsel for certain applicants, including unaccompanied children 13 and under.

On his first day in office, Mr. Biden proposed legislation that would have created a path to citizenship for about 11 million undocumented immigrants and expanded visas for workers and families. Congress did not take it up.

The bipartisan border-security deal he endorsed this year — which Congress also did not pass — would have made more limited changes, including adding 250,000 family- and employment-based visas over five years and ensuring green-card eligibility for the children of immigrants on H-1B visas for highly skilled workers. It also would have enacted measures to reduce illegal border crossings.

Through executive action, he has made migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela eligible for a temporary legal entry program for people whose home countries are in turmoil. He has also admitted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians under a similar program.

Mr. Biden revoked Mr. Trump’s travel bans, which had barred travelers from several majority-Muslim countries, on his first day in office.

After the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, Mr. Biden strongly backed Israel, describing its invasion and bombardment of Gaza as justified self-defense and becoming the first U.S. president to visit Israel during wartime.

As the war has dragged on — killing tens of thousands of Gazans and putting the territory on the brink of famine — he has become increasingly critical of the Israeli government, urging it to reduce civilian casualties. But the United States has continued to supply weapons to Israel.

Mr. Biden paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs in the spring, as Israel began its military offensive in Rafah, the southern city to which more than a million Gazans had fled. But he advanced a different arms sale shortly after that.

While he had warned that Israel would cross a “red line” if it invaded Rafah, he later said an Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Rafah did not cross that red line.

In March, he endorsed a temporary cease-fire, and his administration allowed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire to pass by abstaining from voting. (It had vetoed three similar resolutions.) In May, he called for a permanent cease-fire.

He also ordered the U.S. military to build a port to deliver aid to Gaza, a few days after it began airdropping food in March. The port effort has been beset by problems and appears likely to end operations early.

After Israel killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that future U.S. aid could depend on whether Israel took steps “to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers.” Israel then said it would allow more food and supplies into Gaza, but aid workers say much more is needed.

In February, Mr. Biden deferred deportation of Palestinians who were in the United States illegally. His administration has considered allowing more Gazan refugees to come, but as of mid-June, it had not done so.

Mr. Biden has endorsed a two-state solution and said that, as a step toward one, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

However, in April, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have recommended recognizing a Palestinian state as a full U.N. member. Mr. Biden’s U.N. ambassador said the veto was because Hamas controlled “a significant portion of what is supposed to be” the Palestinians’ state.

The Biden administration said in February that new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were “inconsistent with international law,” reversing a Trump-era policy. But at the same time, it defended Israel’s existing occupation of those territories before the International Court of Justice.

Mr. Biden also used an executive order to impose sanctions on four Israeli settlers accused of attacking civilians in the West Bank. The order — which went further than a previous visa ban from the State Department — said that “extremist settler violence” threatened “the foreign policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution.”

Mr. Biden helped Israel defend itself in April against an attack from Iran, which fired hundreds of drones and missiles toward the country after Israel struck a building in the Iranian embassy complex in Syria. The United States was one of several countries that helped intercept the barrage.

He urged Israel to view its defense as a victory and not retaliate further; it did retaliate, but opted for a limited strike that avoided further escalation.

Mr. Biden denounced the tactics of some pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, arguing that a wide range of actions — including vandalism and intimidation as well as nonviolent disruptions that forced “the cancellation of classes and graduations” — did not qualify as peaceful protests. He said in early May that he had not reconsidered his policies in response to them.

In April, a White House spokesman condemned protesters at Columbia University after some of the demonstrations took a dark turn. “Calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic,” the spokesman, Andrew Bates, said. Mr. Biden later said he rejected both antisemitism and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

After police crackdowns on several campuses, he said: “Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder.”

He said he did not support calling in the National Guard, as some Republicans had urged.

Mr. Biden said in 2020 that criticism of Israel could be antisemitic but that it was not inherently so. “Criticism of Israel’s policy is not antisemitism, but too often that criticism from the left morphs into antisemitism,” he said.

His administration released the United States’ first strategy for combating antisemitism last year, after several years in which reports of antisemitic incidents increased — a trend that began when Mr. Trump was in office and that has continued under Mr. Biden. The plan’s recommendations include making it easier to report hate crimes, holding anti-bias workshops geared toward workplaces and hiring, and strengthening Holocaust education.

The Biden administration also opened investigations into possible discrimination against both Jewish and Muslim college students.

Mr. Biden has deep policy disagreements with Mr. Netanyahu that predate the Oct. 7 attack. Most notably, his administration pressured Mr. Netanyahu last year to abandon an attempt to overhaul the Israeli judiciary. Mr. Netanyahu delayed but ultimately carried out the plan, which Israel’s Supreme Court then struck down.

Disagreements between the two have come to a head over Israel’s actions in Gaza. In March, Mr. Biden praised a speech in which the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, denounced Mr. Netanyahu. And in May, he said there was “every reason for people to draw” the conclusion that Mr. Netanyahu was prolonging the war in order to hold on to office. But he also said he did not believe that Mr. Netanyahu was “playing politics” with the war.

Mr. Biden has been careful with his criticism of Mr. Netanyahu, and reluctant to take actions that would concretely affect Mr. Netanyahu’s government or the war.

Mr. Biden has pledged not to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. “I guarantee it will not happen,” he said last year.

But while he has taken a number of steps to keep Medicare solvent at its current benefit levels, he has not done the same for Social Security. Projections fluctuate based on economic conditions, but estimates from this spring indicate that if policies continue unchanged, Social Security and its associated disability insurance program will run out of money to cover full benefits in 2035.

The Inflation Reduction Act, one of Mr. Biden’s signature legislative accomplishments, allowed Medicare for the first time to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies — a policy that could both lower prices for consumers and save the program money. The law also included a requirement that drug companies make payments to Medicare if they increase their prices faster than inflation, and reduced the amount that beneficiaries have to pay out of pocket for expensive medications.

Mr. Biden has called for putting the money saved by those policies into Medicare’s hospital trust fund to extend the program’s full solvency beyond the current projection of 2036. He has also proposed increasing Medicare taxes for people earning more than $400,000 a year.

During the 2020 campaign, he proposed expanding Medicare benefits by lowering the eligibility age to 60 from 65, but he has not made a major push to do that in office.

His campaign pledge to raise taxes on people earning more than $400,000 to fund Social Security and increase benefits for low-income recipients also has not been realized, though he reiterated it this spring. One possible way to do that would be to raise or lift a cap on how much income is subject to Social Security taxes, which would mean wealthy people would pay more.

During his time in the Senate, Mr. Biden expressed openness to cuts that he now opposes, including raising the retirement age and reducing benefits.