White House remains worried about women’s health access

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) – Gray Television’s White House correspondent Jon Decker asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the election’s impact on the issue of abortion, as well as the vice president’s performance in this campaign.

He asked Jean-Pierre, “One of the issues debated, discussed quite a bit during the course of the campaign was the issue of reproductive rights. Is the White House and the president concerned that with a Republican in the White House, Republicans controlling the Senate, a super conservative majority on the Supreme Court, at the very least, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the House that reproductive freedoms for women will be rolled back.

The White House press secretary confirmed that women’s reproductive rights remains a concern, saying, “that is something that we have said consistently that we are concerned about. I believe three national bans on abortion were introduced in Congress. This is something that Republicans elected officials continue to go after. The rights for women to make a decision on their own body, very difficult decisions, a decision that should be kept between, a woman, her family and her doctor. And so, you know, it is incredibly concerning. And, we’re talking about women across the country whose health could be at risk. And so what I can say is the president and the vice president is going to continue to stand, with majority of Americans on calling on Congress to restore the protections of what we made. That’s what we want to see. Are we concerned? Yes. We’re concerned. Nothing changes, about our concern about that post-election. And they’ve Republicans in Congress have made themselves very, very clear. And so we’re going to do everything that we can when we have we have taken steps to protect women. And this decision for important, critical decisions that they have to make. And so that will certainly continue.”

Jon Decker also asked about the outcome of the 2024 election, “You said the vice president ran a great campaign, and yet she underperformed one in every state compared with President Biden when she ran in 2020. Why do you suppose that was?”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre demurred, saying she’s not a political analyst, “I’m not going to do punditry from here. That is not something that I’m going to do. I’m not going to dive into the data. I’m not going to do that. There’s going to be plenty of time for election experts to look under the hood, to tinker around in it, to figure out what happened. I’ll leave that to them to, to deal with. But I would say she ran an impressive campaign. Some of you reported that what she was able to do. It was impressive how she ran the which amount of money she was able to raise, how she was able to put together a campaign around her. A campaign that obviously the president built and was happy to hand that over to her. And she stepped up to the moment. Now, there’s going to be a lot that’s that’s going to be discussed about what happen. The data, but exactly what occurred. And so I’m going to leave that to them. But what I will say, and I think this is just a data point that I’ve been talking about, about what we’ve seen in G7 countries, what we’ve seen with encumbrances after the pandemic, because what the disruptions that the pandemic caused, even though we did what we, we did everything that we could to have policies to get us out of the pandemic and leading the world on the economic front. There were, political toll, right? The pandemic led to some political tolls for incumbency. That’s just a data point that I’m sharing with all of you. That has been consistent to what we’ve seen with G7 countries. And so I’ll just leave it there.”

Karine Jean-Pierre said the president has invited president-elect Trump to the white House to discuss the transition. That meeting will likely take place in the next few weeks at the White House. President Biden is traveling to South America November 14-19.

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