Just days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered “children,” President Biden held a fundraiser at the home of a leading Silicon Valley proponent of stem cell research, warning that voting for Donald Trump would undermine the reproductive rights that going further than would restrict abortion.

“Trump and his MAGA friends are determined to take away your basic freedoms,” Biden said Thursday during a small event at the home of real estate developers Bob Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein.

Klein was the leader of Proposition 71, a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2004 that secured public funding for stem cell research to support medical discoveries and cures for diseases. The measure came after former Republican President George W. Bush limited federal funding for the research because of ethical concerns from religious conservatives about the destruction of human embryos that provide the cells.

Biden’s visit to Klein’s home in the prosperous world

city ​​of

Los Altos Hills comes as Alabama court ruling halts departure from in vitro fertilization treatments known as IVF

some

patients there who had hoped to conceive children through the procedure that was mixed up. The practice involves combining sperm and eggs in a laboratory to create embryos and implanting them

a

uterus.

The Alabama court ruling that found that those who destroy frozen embryos could be liable for wrongful death has raised new concerns about access to reproductive health care amid uncertainty about abortion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision 2022 at Roe vs. Wade, to overturn the landmark decision that protected abortion rights. rural.

The issue has reignited partisan ethics debates over the medical use of stem cells, with Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley saying this week that she believes embryos are babies.

At Thursday’s event, Biden doubled down on his pledge to veto any national abortion ban proposed by Congress, saying that if he is re-elected and Democrats gain control of Congress in November, his administration will could undo far-reaching rollbacks of reproductive rights.

“I promise you that we will fully restore Roe v. Wade,” Biden said to applause.

When Vice President Kamala Harris visited San Jose last month, she also emphasized the need for voters to give Democrats the lead to prevent a national abortion ban.

Trump has taken credit for overturning Roe vs. Wade, made possible by his appointments to the Supreme Court, and the New York Times reported this week that if elected, he plans to go even further and focus on abortion.

pill

access.

All these rights and all these progress are at real risk of being lost if Joe Biden is not re-elected, Klein said Thursday, pointing to IVF, abortion, cancer research and progress in lowering the cost of life-saving prescriptions.

Steve Westley, the former California state comptroller who ran unsuccessfully for governor as a Democrat in 2006, also co-hosted the Bay Area event, which was held in a remote residential area near Santa Clara, where horses and donkeys roamed through the neighbors’ gardens.

Tickets for the event cost between $6,600 and $100,000. Among those present were Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a Democrat, and TV journalist Katie Couric, an advocate for pancreatic cancer research.

Biden, who has been in California since Tuesday and stopped at fundraisers in Los Angeles and San Francisco, returned to the White House on Thursday, where state leaders, including the governor of the United States, gave a speech. Gavin Newsom, awaited his arrival before the National Governors Assn. winter meeting.

Biden, 81, nodded to criticism about his ability to serve another term at his age and shared a common refrain on the campaign trail to compare him to the alternative, not “the all-powerful.”

I am not the gift of all presidents, but I am certainly better than the last.”