The Trump administration announced today that they’re massively expanding the anti-abortion Mexico City policy. Also called the Global Gag Rule, this policy bans any foreign aid from going to organizations that provide or even talk about abortion. It’s a nightmare rule responsible for tens of thousands of deaths a year.
Apparently that wasn’t enough horror for the White House, so they’ve broadened the rule to ban funding for any program or organization that includes “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “gender ideology.” That means groups that even discuss LGBTQ issues or racism could be stripped of support; The New York Times reports that the new rule will impact more than $30 billion in foreign assistance.
The move appears to be one of several from the Trump administration aimed at placating the anti-abortion movement—which is not happy with the administration’s relative lack of action on abortion pills. In addition to expanding the Mexico City policy, the White House will cut off NIH funding for research that uses human fetal tissue and will “review” how Planned Parenthood used its COVID-era loans. (POLITICO has more details on both.)
But there’s something else nagging at me with this Mexico City announcement, and it has to do with something JD Vance said…
At the March for Life today, the vice president bragged that the administration has “completely realigned U.S. foreign aid and turned off the tap for NGOs whose sole purpose is to dissuade people from having kids.”
If Vance was talking about groups that promote abortion, he would have said so. Instead, he appeared to describe organizations that help people avoid pregnancy. I think the vice president dropped a hint that the Trump administration wants to officially stop funding family planning abroad.
Because here’s the thing—the White House has already started to do just that. It wasn’t so long ago that the administration wanted to burn a multimillion-dollar stockpile of birth control rather than send it to women abroad. Why? Because they claimed that the IUDs, birth control pills, and hormonal implants were actually “abortifacient contraceptives.”
In other words, the government officially classified common forms of birth control as abortion. And when international humanitarian groups tried to purchase the stockpile to stop them from being burned, the U.S. government rejected the offer—by citing the Mexico City policy. A rule supposedly about abortion was used to prevent access to birth control.
And while the U.S. already stopped providing international family planning dollars when the Trump administration cut off UNFPA funding and gutted USAID, those moves were always framed as generic foreign aid cuts (or other issues around abortion).
But now—on the very same day the administration expands the Mexico City policy to include “DEI” and “gender ideology”—the vice president is bragging about cutting off funding to groups that “dissuade people from having kids.”
Sounds to me like the administration is laying the groundwork to once again openly conflate contraception with abortion, and possibly cut off international family planning dollars explicitly and officially.
I wish I was done talking about JD Vance, but alas. The vice president really did bring his trademark couch-fucker energy to the March for Life today, where he went on a bizarre rant about sex-trafficking pagans and advised women against having jobs.
First, Vance repeated the same bizarre story he told back in October about “baby skeletons” being found in the ruins of an “ancient brothel.” He even said that most of the skeletons were baby boys, because “unlike little girls, those boys would be of no use to the future adults who were running those brothels.” Yuck.
Watch the video below, if you have the stomach for it:
Vance’s dog-whistles about “civilization” and “barbarism” are so absurdly obvious, but I guess you have to be explicit when talking to the dodos at the March for Life.
Vance also gave a shout out to clinic harassers, characterizing violent extremists who terrorize providers and patients as praying “priests and grandmothers.” And he addressed the “elephant in the room”—aka the movement being pissed that the administration isn’t doing enough. Vance urged patience, and for the activists in the audience to “look at where the fight for life stood just one decade ago, and now look where it stands today.”
But my favorite part was when Vance went full bro-natalist batshit and told women to stay at home:
“To our fellow Americans, we say you’re never going to find great meaning in a cubicle or in front of a computer screen. But you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life.”
Yes, when Vance says “Americans,” he absolutely means women. How do I know? 1) Common sense. 2) He said nearly the same thing in 2022 on Twitter, but at least then he had the courage of his shitty misogynist convictions:
Here we go again! Mayday Health is under attack by yet another Republican attorney general—this time in Kentucky. Just weeks after South Dakota’s AG tried to force the group to remove their ads from gas stations across the state, Kentucky AG Russell Coleman is following suit.
But instead of targeting Mayday directly, Coleman has sent subpoenas to the gas stations carrying the ads—claiming they “could be participating” in delivering abortion pills to the anti-choice state.
Remember, the ads are very simple—they read: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Learn more at Mayday Health,” with a link to the group’s website.
But attacks against pro-choice speech have been ramping up recently—targeting abortion funds, especially, and focusing specifically on speech about abortion pills. (We all know why.) In addition to what’s happening in Kentucky and South Dakota, North Dakota’s attorney general sent a cease-and-desist to Prairie Abortion Fund (PAF) because they link to websites that link to abortion providers. And in South Carolina, Republicans introduced a bill that would make it a crime to give someone money for their abortion, donate to an abortion fund, or work/volunteer with a fund.
I said this at my talk at Tulane last night, and I think it’s worth repeating: this is a sign of how powerful the abortion rights movement and community is. They don’t even want us talking to each other. As awful as the attacks are, we should be proud that they’re this scared.
I’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
Jfc—Indiana is still at it. For years, Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita has been trying to make women’s abortion reports public records like birth and death certificates. Now, Republican legislators and one of the nation’s most powerful conservative legal groups is trying to help him out.
The Thomas More Society has petitioned the state Supreme Court on behalf of the anti-abortion organization Voices for Life, asking the judges to “restore public access to Terminated Pregnancy Reports (TPRs).” Remember, Rokita has argued that the only way he can do his job is if anti-abortion groups like Voices for Life comb through women’s abortion reports to find ‘evidence’ of ‘wrongdoing’.
While conservatives used to claim they were seeking the reports to protect women’s health, they’ve become more explicit in recent years that it really is all about seeking to punish providers. And btw, groups like Voices for Life rarely find actual wrongdoing. It’s more likely that they identify paperwork errors that allow the state to ding clinics. In other words, this isn’t just a gross violation of privacy—but petty narc shit.
Republican legislators are also joining in. Kylie told you a little about SB 236 earlier this week—in part, it allows people to sue each other over abortion. But the bill would also, of course, make abortion reports public records.
I have to point something out here: in 2024, only 142 people had reported abortions in Indiana. So all of this insanity—all of this harm and horror—over less than 150 abortions?
Read more about the bill at the Indiana Capital Chronicle.
As the Missouri abortion trial continues on, a state health regulator admitted that abortion clinics were subject to a higher level of scrutiny that didn’t have anything to do with health or safety.
John Langston with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services actually appeared as a witness for the state this week, but Missouri Independent reports that the truth came out when he was questioned by Planned Parenthood’s lawyers. Langston admitted that the focus on clinics was unrelated to “noncompliance,” and that the “pro-life” OBGYN in charge of the state health department at the time was behind many of the investigations into clinics:
“Most of the complaints against the facilities were unsubstantiated, Langston said, and were often made by the same groups of protesters who frequently stood outside of the clinics and tried to talk to anyone going inside.”
And when the state denied one clinic’s license renewal over “deficiencies,” they weren’t related to patient safety—but things like dust, peeling laminate, or not getting fetal tissue to a pathologist fast enough.
I know, I know—none of us are surprised.
Here in my home state of New York, abortion medication distributed by NYC health clinics is on the rise—especially as restrictions grow across the country. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported yesterday that there’s been a 24% increase since last year in free abortion pills provided by the city’s sexual health clinics. City clinics started providing free abortion pills in 2023, and launched the Abortion Access Hub hotline in 2022. (You can reach that hotline at 1-877-NYC-AHUB)
Finally, Florida Democrats have introduced legislation to restore abortion rights in the state, filing the Reproductive Freedom Act on the 53rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade. Given Republican control in the Florida legislature, this is more of a symbolic move than anything else—but it’s appreciated.
As the anti-abortion movement came together in Washington DC this week, leading groups used the opportunity to call out the White House for not doing more to stop the shipping of abortion pills.
Medication abortion makes it possible for women to sidestep state bans, and is in part responsible for the fact that the abortion rate hasn’t decreased since Dobbs. (Right now, nearly 30% of U.S. abortions are provided via telehealth.) So you can imagine why the anti-abortion movement is so eager to stop them.
When Trump was elected, advocates hoped that the administration would start to enforce the Comstock Act, the 150-year-old zombie law that prohibited the mailing of “obscene” materials. But the winning-obsessed president doesn’t seem all that interested in doing something that’s so clearly unpopular.
“They could pull these drugs out of the mail tomorrow,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America legal director Katie Glenn Daniel told CNN. “The justification is more than there.”
And Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, made a pointed comment seemingly directed at Trump’s obvious ambivalence over abortion:
“If there are those that don’t care about the life issue, they should care about the politics of this. This is going to be a political problem for those who have sold out the pro-life movement.”
With antis getting more and more pissed—especially with Trump telling them to be “flexible” on abortion in ACA negotiations—the White House decided they needed to throw the movement a bone. That’s why they expanded the Mexico City policy, for example, and why they pulled NIH funding that used fetal tissue. But according to the Washington Post, one anti-abortion leader called the moves “cleanup on Aisle 5.”
A White House official insisted to POLITICO, “This isn’t a clean-up job…this is just us always doing what we said we were going to do.”
Whatever, I love to see these idiots fighting.
I promise this will be the last bit of news about the March for Life (or as Kylie aptly called it, Forced Birth Coachella). But I held my nose through the speeches and interviews to get a sense of what anti-abortion leaders are focusing on this year, and this is what I learned.
In an interview with the National Catholic Register, March for Life president Jennie Bradley Lichter said the movement is paying particular attention to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. She also pushed back against the idea that abortion is a losing issue for Republicans, claiming “there’s no data, no examples to support the idea that pro-life politicians have been losing elections since Dobbs.” Uhhh, I think we could name a few!
Kristan Hawkins from Students for Life and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, are out there doing the same thing—making the case that abortion politics drives out votes for Republicans. “A demotivated pro-life movement would spell disaster for midterm battlegrounds,” Dannenfelser told WaPo.
But history hasn’t really borne that out. Just look at what happened in Virginia—twice! Whenever Republicans listen to these activists and hone in on abortion, they lose:
I have to imagine what’s more compelling for the GOP is the threats Dannenfelser is lobbing: she says her group will pull support from anyone who doesn’t out swinging for them. As unpopular as abortion is as an issue, SBA is a powerhouse organization that spends a lot of money in battleground states to get out the Republican vote. I’m sure the GOP takes her warnings seriously—not because they’re afraid of abortion, but because they need SBA and their door-knockers.
The Center for Reproductive Rights is suing the Trump administration over its decision to selectively stop enforcing the FACE Act—the federal law meant to protect abortion clinics from violence and blockades. As soon as Trump took office, his DOJ announced that they wouldn’t be enforcing the FACE Act unless someone was killed. (Literally.) A few months later, a DOJ official said the agency would enforce the law—but against pro-choice activists.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told conservative pundit Glenn Beck that the “only violence” being committed lately is against the “rights of speech and prayer” of protesters outside of clinics—and that the DOJ would be “aggressively going after” anyone who ‘attacks’ these protesters or crisis pregnancy centers.
This all came at the same time that the White House gave extremists a green light to harass and hurt clinic providers and patients. All of which is to say—good on CRR.