This week marks 100 days since President Donald Trump took office for a second term. In that time, Trump has made several moves that affect abortion and reproductive health care access across the country.
Within his first month in office, Trump acted quickly on a number of issues related to reproductive health. He pardoned several anti-abortion protesters convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law intended to protect abortion clinics and patients by barring people from physically blocking or threatening patients. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said it would be curtailing prosecutions against people accused of violating the FACE Act. The Department of Defense rescinded a Biden-era policy that helped facilitate travel for active service members and their families to obtain certain reproductive health care services, including abortion. Internationally, the Trump Administration’s freeze on foreign aid halted reproductive health care services for millions of people. Trump also reinstated what’s known as the Mexico City Policy or the Global Gag Rule, a policy often implemented by Republican presidents that prohibits foreign organizations receiving U.S. aid from providing or discussing abortion care.
Since February, the Trump Administration has taken additional actions that have limited or threatened access to reproductive health care.
Here’s what else Trump has done on reproductive health care in his first 100 days—and what reproductive rights advocates fear could happen next.
The Administration dropped a Biden-era lawsuit seeking to protect access to emergency abortions
In March, the DOJ filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit it had inherited from the Biden Administration. The original lawsuit was about a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires emergency rooms that receive Medicare dollars to stabilize patients experiencing medical emergencies before discharging or transferring them, whether or not the patient is able to pay. The Biden Administration had argued that emergency abortion care is required because of EMTALA, and that Idaho’s near-total abortion ban conflicted with the federal law. The state of Idaho has rejected that claim.
The Trump Administration dropping the lawsuit would have allowed Idaho to fully enforce its near-total abortion ban, even in medical emergencies. But the state’s largest health care provider, St. Luke’s Health System, had filed its own lawsuit a few months earlier in anticipation of the Trump Administration dropping the case, and a judge temporarily blocked Idaho from fully carrying out its ban.
Abortion rights advocates condemned the Trump Administration’s decision to drop the lawsuit. Amy Friedrich-Karnik—director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, which researches and supports sexual and reproductive health—says the case was, at its core, about protecting people’s access to “life-saving care” in the most urgent situations.
The Administration froze Title X funding for 16 organizations
On April 1, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began withholding Title X funding from 16 organizations. Enacted in 1970, Title X is the country’s sole federally funded family planning program. The program, which does not fund abortion services, allocates more than $200 million a year for clinics that provide birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and other health care services for people from low-income households. HHS said it was withholding funds from the organizations in the Title X program “pending an evaluation of possible violations” of federal civil rights laws, and the President’s Executive Order that said undocumented immigrants are prohibited “from obtaining most taxpayer-funded benefits.” The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA), a membership organization for family planning providers, and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued the Trump Administration over the freeze.
According to NFPRHA, the freeze is threatening about $65.8 million in Title X funds, potentially affecting more than 840,000 patients. Reproductive rights advocates have said the freeze would prevent some of the most vulnerable community members from accessing a range of health care services.
“When you go after Title X for contraceptive access, there’s a ripple effect across all types of reproductive health care,” Friedrich-Karnik says.
Mass layoffs at HHS
On March 27, HHS announced that it would reduce its staff from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees—about 10,000 from layoffs and an additional 10,000 from staffers who retired or resigned. Included in those cuts was eliminating “the majority of employees” in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) reproductive health division, according to the legal advocacy group Center for Reproductive Rights. A team at the CDC focused on compiling data on abortion access—including the number of people getting abortions and what methods they choose—has been eliminated, according to Shannon Russell, federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“It really stymies efforts to understand the impact of state abortion bans in the aftermath of [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization],” Russell said during a press briefing.
The staff working on the CDC’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), which collected data on maternal and infant health, was cut. The team working on the National Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance System, which provided patients with information about options such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), was also eliminated.
“This is really hampering HHS’s efforts to ensure that people are getting quality, essential reproductive health care and that they know their options,” Russell said.
What experts anticipate could happen next
Experts are waiting to see what actions the Trump Administration will take on mifepristone, a drug that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved for abortion use more than two decades ago. Years of research have proven that the drug is safe, but anti-abortion groups have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to challenge it in court, and during his confirmation hearing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Trump has expressed an interest in launching further research into mifepristone.
Russell said the Center for Reproductive Rights also anticipates that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will seek to limit abortion care. In March, the VA submitted for review an interim final rule regarding reproductive health services; the details of the rule have not been publicized, but abortion rights advocates fear that the rule will reinstate the VA’s previous abortion ban, repealing a Biden-era policy that had allowed VA medical facilities to offer abortion counseling and abortion care to veterans and their beneficiaries in certain situations.
Friedrich-Karnik says the Trump Administration could withhold additional Title X funds or place restrictions on grant recipients, as the Administration did during Trump’s first term. She adds that the DOJ may continue to take an anti-abortion stance in various cases, such as declining to prosecute protesters accused of violating the FACE Act.
Trump’s actions on reproductive rights have drawn support from anti-abortion activists. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement that Trump “set the bar for a pro-life president” in his first term, and applauded the actions he’s taken within the first 100 days of his second term. In March, Trump said that he would be known as the “fertilization president,” and the New York Times reported last week that the White House has been evaluating ways to convince women to have children. But Russell criticized the Trump Administration for offering what she called “sweepstakes style incentives” to encourage people to have children without implementing policies to ensure that people have the support and resources they need to do so, while curtailing access to reproductive health care.
“They have made it more dangerous to be pregnant,” Russell said, “and they’ve done nothing to ensure that people who want to grow or build their families are able to do so more affordably and more accessibly.”
