Former President Joe Biden received an award and spoke at Planned Parenthood of Delaware’s annual fundraising gala on Thursday, September 24, saying he was “outraged and appalled” when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade during his presidency.
Former President Biden received the 2026 Sonia Schorr Sloan Service Award, which is named after Sonia Sloan, a longtime Democratic activist and supporter of Biden’s political career. Sloan was the president of Planned Parenthood of Delaware from 1980 to 1984 and was on its board of directors until her death in 2019.
The award, said Planned Parenthood of Delaware, is given annually to someone whose work “reflects the same dedication” that Sloan had towards the organisation.
In her introduction, Jill Biden explained that she and her husband “have always believed that the decisions that shape a family belong to that family, not to the politicians”, and that “I’ve watched him wrestle with what it means when a freedom that Americans once believed was settled is suddenly taken away”.
“When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I watched Joe confront the reality that our granddaughters would grow up with fewer rights than the generation before them,” said Jill Biden. “But he was not willing to accept that. As president, he used the power of his office to defend access to reproductive healthcare.”
Jill Biden praised her husband as someone “who stood with Planned Parenthood and millions of Americans in defending the fundamental right of women to make their own decisions about their own bodies and their own futures”.
Former President Biden was the second Catholic to be elected president of the United States.
In his speech, he said it was a “profound honour” to receive an award in Sloan’s name, saying she was “not only brilliant, she was tough”.
Sloan was not alive to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, but former President Biden said that “one of the people I thought of was [Sloan]”.
Sloan, he said, would have been “outraged and appalled, as we all were”, but would have “not been afraid” and would have kept up the fight to restore a legal right to abortion.
“I tried to do what I know [Sloan] would have been on the phone telling me to do,” said former President Biden. “We signed an executive order to protect access to reproductive healthcare, including emergency medical care.”
The executive order also ensured that it would be legal for a woman to leave a state and obtain an abortion in another state where it was legal, said former President Biden, bemoaning that “initially, you could not leave your state if it did not have [abortion]”.
The United States, said former President Biden, is “one of the only countries in the world that time and time again has come out of every crisis we face stronger than we went into that crisis. And I believe with every fibre of my being, and with your help, we’re going to do it again.”
In writing the Dobbs decision, said former President Biden, “the majority of the court dared us to stand up and be heard”.
The current time, said former President Biden, is not one to “give up”, but “get up”.
“Folks, we can do this. I promise you, we can do this. And we will.”
