Donald Trump’s projected victory in the presidential race this week likely spells doom for what remains of abortion rights in the United States.
In the first presidential election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Americans’ positions shifted further to the right. The Republican Party has won control of the Senate and Trump is currently on track to become the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote. Despite seven out of 10 states voting in favor of protecting abortion care, voters still supported a candidate likely to decimate women’s reproductive health care.
Trump shunned his anti-abortion record during his campaign: soothing his rhetoric around reproductive rights, doubtful about a national abortion ban and expressing his lie that “everyoneRoe wanted repealed. When Roe fell, Republicans quickly realized that rolling back abortion rights is inherently unpopular; the seven The victories from pro-choice ballot measures this election season are a testament to America’s views on abortion access. But now Trump is in power and those guardrails are gone.
The man who ran the most misogynistic presidential campaign in history in 2016, and this time a blatantly racist one, holds the keys to women’s bodily autonomy, and he will use them to turn back the clock on hard-earned reproductive rights .
We know what Trump will do next on abortion thanks to Project 2025 – an extreme policy agenda that lays out the next steps for a second Trump term. The plan evokes images of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by dismantling sex education, supervise some pregnancies, threatening access to contraception and banning abortion nationwide. Trump continues to align himself with some of the most extreme anti-abortion advocates in the country, and now that he is back in power, he will very likely bring them with him.
As president, Trump will be able to enforce this the Comstock Acta 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending “obscene” material by post, including anything “intended to procure an abortion.” The Comstock Act will essentially create a backdoor abortion ban overnight by criminalizing the sending of abortion pills through the mail — an entry point that has been critical since the repeal of federal abortion protections. Trump doesn’t need Congress to sign off on it, and it will impact people in every state, even those that have abortion protections.
Trump’s allies have done just that made it clear time and time again that they plan to use the Comstock Act to circumvent any government oversight that might prevent them from banning abortion nationwide. “We don’t need a federal ban if we have Comstock on the books,” said Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of the bounty hunter abortion ban in Texas, told The New York Times earlier this year. Mitchell indicated that anti-abortion groups have deliberately remained silent on the Comstock Act because it is such a powerful weapon for Republicans.
Trump claimed he will not enforce the Comstock Act, after months of pressing questions. But his own running mate, Senator JD Vance wrote a 2023 letter calling on the Justice Department to use Comstock to criminalize “the reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail.”
Under Project 2025, Trump’s allies plan to rename the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to Department For Life, where a task force would oversee all anti-abortion efforts across the federal government. Although Trump has distanced himself from the far-right policy agenda, the plan mentions him more than 300 times and was written by longtime Trump advisers who were part of his 2017 administration or his campaign team.
The Trump administration will also appoint some of the most anti-abortion extremists to power. During his first term, he was able to appoint three Supreme Court justices — the reason Roe was overturned — and now he may get another chance to add to that list.
He will appoint a new head of the Food and Drug Administration, who could revoke the agency’s approval for mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. The Biden administration protected and defended access to mifepristone before the Supreme Court this summer. But a Trump-appointed FDA commissioner would likely do the opposite and remove mifepristone from circulation. Mifepristone, along with another abortion drug called misoprostol, is used in more than 60% of abortions nationwide. By removing mifepristone from the shelves, Trump could effectively implement an abortion ban in both red and blue states.
He will also appoint a new attorney general — one who could choose to wield the Justice Department’s power against abortion seekers. Trump hovered Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as a name on his shortlist this summer. Paxton is a notorious opponent of abortion who last year petition filed The Texas Supreme Court has decided to ban a woman from having a medically necessary abortion. Him too recently indicted to access medical records of Texas women seeking out-of-state abortions. Here’s who the next US Attorney General could be.
Mitchell, the attorney behind Texas’ six-week abortion ban, has been put forward as the Trump administration’s candidate for attorney general, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The Solicitor General is accountable to the Attorney General, but still has a tremendous amount of power, including deciding which cases the government will appeal to the Supreme Court. Mitchell is a notorious opponent of abortion who has been weaponized to circumvent traditional legal options in his quest to limit reproductive rights. He too represented Trump in the Supreme Court case.
Another hint about how Trump might try to ban abortion was quietly tucked away in a line about the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, included in the Republican Party platform released during his campaign. The amendment was originally drafted to protect formerly enslaved Black people by ratifying that no state “shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Trump’s party platform indicated that the Republican Party hopes to extend these rights to embryos and fetuses, which, when taken to its logical conclusion, is a call for a nationwide total ban on abortion.
Barring abortion, anyone with the possibility of pregnancy would be vulnerable if the federal government did this established fetal personality; it would jeopardize vital reproductive health care, including miscarriage treatment, contraception and in vitro fertilization, and increase the likelihood that pregnancies will be criminalized across the board.
American women are not the only ones who will suffer under a Trump administration. Women and pregnant people around the world will too. Trump will do that undoubtedly restore the global gag rulea policy that prohibits the federal government from providing U.S. assistance to an international health organization that also provides information on abortion care. The rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, was created in 1984 under President Ronald Reagan and since then every Democratic president has repealed it and every Republican president has put it back in place.
So it was no surprise when Trump reinstated the gag rule in 2017 during his first term, but his impact was far greater than the Republican administration, as he expanded the global gag rule several times. Until 2017, the gag rule was applied only to the portion of U.S. funds that went to family planning services, but when Trump came to power he expanded the rule to include restrictions on all global health financing — not just reproductive health dollars . This means that the gag rule dictated what foreign NGOs could also do with their own money, not just with U.S. federal aid.
The 2017 Trump administration broadened the policy again in 2019 to cut aid to groups that donated to other abortion-related organizations. Essentially, this move prevented NGOs from receiving funding for essential services such as access to clean water, sanitation, and HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis programs if those organizations also offered abortion services or information about abortion.
Trump also aligned the United States with some of the most socially conservative countries in the world when he founded and signed on to the United States Geneva Consensus Declaration – a radical coalition that declared there was “no international law” on abortion and undermined same-sex couples by reaffirming traditional family roles. The coalition broke with the UN consensus and included several countries that the UN has accused of human rights abuses.
Trump was voted out of the White House in 2020 while trying to expand the global gag rule for a third time. It is very likely that once Trump is sworn in, he will pick up where he left off.
