President Joe Biden insists that he strongly believes in the rights spelled out in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that are now under the most dire threat in decades.

But he barely even uses the word “abortion” and when his administration has been asked about what it can do to protect reproductive rights, the response has mostly been that Congress must write the landmark court decision into law, a strategy that is highly likely to fail.

To women who rallied to Biden’s presidential campaign in no small part to protect the landmark 1973 court ruling, that’s not nearly enough.

The administration’s measured response to a series of major setbacks for the right to have an abortion lacks in urgency for many advocates, who feel Biden should be doing more after the conservative-majority Supreme Court signaled a willingness to strike down all or part of the rights enshrined in the case that legalized abortion.

“What we want is to see is ideally the president use the bully pulpit to talk about abortion in a strong and effective way,” said Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center. “It matters. It matters for the stigma that surrounds abortion, and it matters to show that it’s a priority for him and his administration.”

The frustration is part of a broader concern among Democrats that the president’s focus on the massive issues of the economy and pandemic response have pushed other urgent matters out of the limelight, including voting rights, immigration and gun control.

It’s an approach that threatens to undermine Biden and Democrats heading into next year’s midterms when they need to rally the party’s most loyal voters, including women and Black people, to maintain control of Congress. It’s also part of a broader problem that women’s rights groups have with the Democrats’ general reluctance to fully embrace the abortion issue in the way that Republicans have.

“This could be seen as an opportunity to talk about an issue that will be important to us in 2022,” said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona. “It doesn’t have to be at the expense of his priorities.” Cardona said “the White House and the bully pulpit and bull horn are big enough to fit all these messages.”

Energy on gun control, immigration and voting rights has been building on the left for years — at least since when President Barack Obama’s legislative agenda stalled out after Democrats lost control of Congress in 2010. But many of the expected benefits of unified control of Washington under Biden have yet to materialize.