President Joe Biden will announce new guidelines and grants to protect reproductive rights and abortions on Tuesday at a meeting of the reproductive rights task force being held 100 days after the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, ending the constitutional federal right to an abortion.
Biden at the meeting will also describe how abortion rights have been curtailed since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to terminate pregnancies.
The meeting will focus on how millions of women cannot access abortion services and doctors and nurses are facing criminal penalties for providing such services.
Abortion bans have gone into effect in more than one dozen states since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling in June.
Nearly 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 six weeks.
At the meeting, Biden will speak about new guidelines for universities from the Department of Education to protect students from discrimination on the basis of pregnancy and $6 million in new grants to protect access to reproductive healthcare services from the Department of Health & Human Services.
It comes as Planned Parenthood announced it will soon open its first mobile abortion clinic in the country, in southern Illinois, operating on the state lines of red states that have banned the procedure.
The mobile Planned Parenthood clinics will begin offering consultations and dispensing abortion pills later this year. It will operate within Illinois, where abortion remains legal, but will be able to travel closer to neighboring states’ borders, reducing the distance many patients travel for the procedure.
Republican lawmakers such as Senator Lindsay Graham are making efforts to issue a nationwide abortion ban. The overturning of Roe has set up likely battles between states with a patchwork of different abortion laws.
Planned Parenthood is planning to expand its mobile units in the future as a part of a larger strategy to find new ways to help patients seeking abortions now that Roe is overturned.
An organization called Just the Pill also recently announced it would be providing mobile clinic-based medication abortion care to patients in the Western and Midwestern United States.
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