President Joe Biden will repeal an important anti-abortion policy instituted by the Trump administration on executive order on Thursday, making it easier for organizations abroad to receive the funding they need to provide reproductive health services.
The policy – known mainly as the “global gag rule” or Mexico City policy – has banned international groups receiving help from the United States to carry out, facilitate or even discuss abortion.
Biden also announced that his government “will take immediate action to consider whether to terminate” another very limiting anti-abortion policy, sometimes called the “domestic gag rule,” said a statement distributed by the Biden government. This rule targeted Planned Parenthood, preventing recipients of Title X family planning government funds from performing or referring for abortion.
“For President Biden, this is personal,” said a statement sent by the White House before the bill was signed. “He believes that every American has the right to the peace of mind that comes with having access to quality, affordable healthcare.”
During his four years in office, Trump instituted and supported policies that profoundly limited access to reproductive rights in the United States and encouraged state and federal lawmakers to introduce and sometimes approve highly obstructive anti-abortion policies.
Biden’s actions on abortion so early in his term signal to abortion rights advocates that he is committed to undoing his predecessor’s legacy on the issue.
The global gag rule
Since President Ronald Reagan first applied the rule in 1984, it has become something of a ritual for every Democratic president to revoke it and for every Republican to reinstate it. This usually occurs at the beginning of the term, around the anniversary of the end of January Roe v. Wade.
But former President Donald Trump, as he does, took his version of the rule two steps further. Former Republican presidents applied the rule only to international non-governmental family planning organizations, but Trump, during his first days in office in 2017, expanded the rule, calling it “Protecting Life in Global Health Care” and applying to any organization that receives US funding and “provides or promotes abortion as a method of birth control”, no matter what its primary focus.
Then, in March 2019, Trump expanded the rule even further, applying it to any local organization supported by groups receiving US funding, increasing the amount of funding affected by about $ 600 million to about $ 12 billion , discovered the reproductive rights research organization Guttmacher. Not only did thousands of international aid organizations cut their reproductive health programs, but they also had to cut all the organizations that helped to fund abortion.
Shortly before the election, in September 2020, Trump tried to extend the effect of the rule for the third time, proposing an amendment that would apply it not only to organizations receiving funding from the United States, but to any organization contracted with the U.S. government. This change, which was still pending on Thursday’s announcement, would have impacted more healthcare organizations globally than any version of the rule introduced earlier.
Even without promulgating the latest version of the rule, Trump’s gigantic gag rule has impacted millions of people worldwide, health and reproductive rights organizations have discovered. Marie Stopes International, a global reproductive health organization that has lost its funding due to the rule, estimates that this loss has led to about 6 million unwanted pregnancies, 1.8 million unsafe abortions and 20,000 maternal deaths.
Trump’s State Department itself concluded, in a review of the rule released in August, that the rule had unintended consequences. Dozens of organizations refused to comply with the rule and lost their funding as a result, and this, “in some cases”, said the review, impacted “health care provision, including for HIV / AIDS, voluntary family / reproductive health planning , tuberculosis and nutritional programming. ”
Title X
During his campaign, Biden has repeatedly promised to reverse the Trump rule that prohibits planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide or refer women for abortions to receive Title X funds. Thursday’s executive order will not by itself repeal the rule, but it is a first step, said the president. The order he plans to sign on Thursday afternoon will require the Department of Health and Human Services to review Trump’s Title X policy with an eye to rescinding it.
The policy, which was finalized by the Trump administration in 2019, was the final version of several attempts to withdraw planned Parenthood funding. However, the money that Trump took – federal money for family planning – did not finance abortions, but mainly supported low-income patients unable to pay out of pocket for reproductive health care. The Hyde Amendment – a federal law of which Biden was a staunch supporter until his Democratic presidential campaign in the 2019 primaries – prohibits any government money from paying directly for abortion. Title X money mainly provides access to contraceptives, sex education, STD tests, cancer screenings and prenatal services.
But Trump’s plan worked. Planned Parenthood stopped receiving funding from the program, cutting its ability to provide contraceptives almost in half, the group said. Nearly 1,000 other reproductive health clinics have also lost Title X funding, Guttmacher found.
Other promises of reproductive rights
These are not the first pro-abortion rights actions taken by the new Biden government. On the real anniversary of Roe v. Wade, On January 22, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris released a statement pledging to make the historic decision that legalized abortion law across the country. If Congress approved, it would mean that if conservative judges appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump overthrow Roe, a federal statute would guarantee that abortion would remain legal across the country.
During his campaign, Biden promised to reissue a guideline preventing states from refusing Medicaid funding for planned paternity and other abortion providers, said he supported the repeal of the Hyde Amendment to allow federal reimbursements for low-income people seeking abortions, and said on his campaign website that he will “make sure that his Department of Justice will do everything in its power to prevent the wave of state laws that so violently violate the constitutional right to abortion”.
But abortion rights advocates want more. Guttmacher asked Biden to increase funding for international family planning programs recently released from the gag rule. And Planned Parenthood released a video urging the Biden government to promote Global Health, Empowerment and Rights (HER) legislation introduced by Democrats in Congress that would permanently eliminate the global gag rule.