Biden’s Cruel Erasure of Navy Joan Roberts

“Does the president acknowledge this little girl as his granddaughter?”

That question, lobbed by Wall Street Journal reporter Catherine Lacey, should have been easy for Karine Jean-Pierre to answer. But in the White House briefing room Wednesday afternoon, the press secretary refused to do so.

“I don’t have anything to share from here,” she said, echoing her answer in early May when posed a similar question by a reporter. That time, Jean-Pierre, sighing, said: “I’m not going to speak to that from here.”

In the enlightened era of 2023, when words like “bastard” and “illegitimate” child seem as old-fashioned as horse-drawn carriages, the Biden White House appears committed to pretending that one inconvenient little Biden doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that an abortion extremist like President Joe Biden — who has backed legislation that would make abortion legal over all nine months of pregnancy if the mother’s health is at risk— should view a seemingly unplanned child’s life as disposable, as not demanding that he step up as a grandfather.

But it’s still shocking how brazen he has been about treating his own granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts, like she doesn’t exist.

When Biden announced he had won the presidential election in 2020, he invited all his other grandchildren up on stage. In both 2021 and 2022, the White House hung Christmas stockings for six grandchildren, completely ignoring Navy Joan, who was born in 2018 and was confirmed as Hunter Biden’s daughter after a court-ordered paternity test in 2019.

“Remarkable that Joe Biden hangs a Christmas stocking for his dog, but won’t acknowledge his granddaughter,” tweeted Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, where Navy Joan lives with her mother, Lunden Roberts.

Remarkable that Joe Biden hangs a Christmas stocking for his dog but won't acknowledge his granddaughter.

Not an ounce of decency. https://t.co/F1uaAhOPhp

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) July 3, 2023

Last week, Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts settled their latest court case, which dealt with whether the little girl could use the Biden last name (she can’t) and how much child support Roberts would receive to raise and care for their daughter.

But based on Jean-Pierre’s answer, don’t look for the 4-year-old to start getting any public recognition from her grandfather now that the court case is settled. Furthermore, a recent New York Times report revealed that “In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told that the Bidens have six, not seven, grandchildren.”

That’s not because Navy Joan—or her mother—are trying to avoid being entangled with the Bidens.

“The girl is aware that her father is Hunter Biden and that her paternal grandfather is the president of the United States,” reported the New York Times’ Katie Rogers on Saturday. “She speaks about both of them often, but she has not met them.”

How cruel can the Bidens be?

Hunter Biden — who has gone on to have son Beau with now-wife Melissa Cohen (Beau is acknowledged publicly as a Biden family member) — has largely been mum on the topic of his daughter. In his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” he suggested that his time with Lunden Roberts was meaningless, describing her—not even using her name—as one of the women he’d “been with during rampages since my divorce … hardly the dating type.”

“We would satisfy our needs and little else,” Hunter Biden wrote, adding:

I’m not proud of it. It’s why I would later challenge in court the woman from Arkansas who had a baby in 2018 and claimed the child was mine—I had no recollection of our encounter. That’s how little connection I had with anyone. I was a mess, but a mess I’ve taken responsibility for.

But whatever the circumstances of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts’ encounter, an innocent child was conceived.

She has done nothing to merit this callous treatment by President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

President Biden seems to be bringing the pro-abortion mindset to this scenario.

After all, abortion allows for the illusion of control. Abortion on demand ensures that even if someone has sex and regrets it, they can put the genie back in the bottle. They can snuff out the life of the baby that resulted.

While Navy Joan is alive, Joe Biden seems to think that he can just ignore her—and he won’t face any accountability. He won’t face awkward questions about whether he thinks children conceived out of wedlock are less deserving of love. He won’t have to answer as to why he thinks it’s OK that his own granddaughter can be brought to D.C., as she was last year, and not get to meet her grandfather.

Infuriatingly, he might be right that he won’t ever be held accountable.

The New York Times may have covered the story, but in the article itself, the Times suggested it was only conservatives who cared, writing that the court case between Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts “has been extensively covered in conservative media, from Breitbart to Fox News, and conservative commentators assailed the Biden family after news of the settlement.”

In general, there has been little appetite to cover the story, despite President Biden’s use of his other grandchildren to present himself as a family man. After all, if the Bidens really wanted their grandchildren to be off limits to the media, there’s an easy enough solution: include all the grandkids at events, or include none of them. Ditto for the Christmas stockings. And don’t tell staff to perpetuate the lie you only have six grandkids when you have seven.

Thankfully, Navy Joan seems to be being raised with lots of love in her life. Her mother’s Instagram shows her visiting the beach, playing baseball, celebrating Easter and touring Washington, D.C. “Wouldn’t trade you for the world,” Roberts captioned one post of her and Navy Joan.

In another post, shared on Mother’s Day, Roberts writes, “To the little girl that made me a mama, Navy Joan, I hope one day when you look back you find yourself proud of who you are, where you come from, and most importantly, who raised you.”

Meanwhile, Roberts’ dad, Rob Roberts, is making sure Navy Joan knows a grandfather’s love. The New York Times reported:

“I may not be the POTUS,” Mr. Roberts said in a text message, using an acronym for the president, but he said he would do anything for his granddaughter. He said she “needs for nothing and never will.”

But it’s still insane that a president can do this in 2023—a supposedly enlightened era where we recognize children should not be faulted for the mistakes of their parents, and should be loved and accepted, whatever the messiness of their conception.

Yet apparently in a world where leftists push abortion relentlessly, it’s easy to slip into a mindset of no unplanned children should be alive, their existence an uncomfortable reminder of past decisions.

When we talk about promulgating a pro-life culture, of course the first hope is for a culture where every conceived child’s right to life is acknowledged and honored. Right now, we’re on a promising trajectory toward that, with a slew of states passing pro-life laws after Roe v. Wade was struck down in June 2022 in the Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization decision.

But a genuinely pro-life culture is also a culture that celebrates life, including when it’s messy. Navy Joan may have been conceived in one of the darkest periods of Hunter Biden’s life, but she herself—a young girl who seems to love America and her family—should be a sign of hope, a beautiful reminder of how so often good is brought out of evil, of how light emerges in the darkness.

It’s too bad Joe Biden is too impoverished to appreciate that.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.