It’s hard to keep track of the damage President Donald Trump has done in his first 100 days in office, from unlawfully deporting migrants andsome U.S. citizens and declaring a war on transgender children to dismantling federal agencies and imposing tariffs that cratered the stock market.
But one dark fear has not yet been realized: an aggressive push to effectively outlaw abortion nationwide. There was widespread concern in 2024 — based on the positions of many people in Trump’s orbit — that his administration might start enforcing the centuries-old Comstock Act or have the Food and Drug Administration pull approval for abortion drugs. While that hasn’t come to pass, the Trump administration has chipped away at choice in less visible ways and done substantial damage to federal reproductive health services.
Not too long ago, Trump was an unapologetic anti-abortion advocate who pandered often to his evangelical far-right base. He openly celebrated his role in repealing 50 years of federal abortion protections, telling Fox News that “it’s a beautiful thing to watch” states ban abortion. But once it became clear that abortion bans are inherently unpopular, Trump shied away from his record: softening his rhetoric around reproductive rights, waffling on a national abortion ban and peddling his lie that “everyone” wanted Roe v. Wade repealed.
Since winning the presidential election, Trump has continued this stance of purported moderation. But he still has an anti-abortion agenda — his administration has just gotten better at hiding it.
“The administration wants you to think that they are not paying attention to repro and that abortion is an issue left to the states … but that is completely untrue,” Ianthe Metzger, senior director of advocacy communications at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told HuffPost.
In his first week as president, Trump reinstated the “global gag rule,” a policy that restricts abortion access around the world and hinders sexual and reproductive health access for many rural communities in developing nations. He signed an executive order to enforce the Hyde Amendment, a 50-year-old federal rule that bans the use of government funds for most abortions for people covered by Medicaid.
And those were just the policy decisions generally expected of a Republican administration. Others have been more extraordinary — undermining decades of political precedent and quietly targeting abortion as well as basic reproductive health care like birth control and sexually transmitted infection prevention and testing.
“The administration wants you to think that they are not paying attention to repro … but that is completely untrue,” Ianthe Metzger told HuffPost. Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
The administration is also working to “change the culture” around family and childbirth. But instead of subsidizing child care or mandating paid parental leave, the White House is entertaining pro-natalist policy ideas, a few of which were once usedby the Nazis. One policy idea floated to the White House included awarding the “National Medal of Motherhood” to any woman who has six or more children. In Nazi Germany, women were awarded a bronze medal for having four children, silver for six and gold for eight children.
Days into his presidency, Trump made an unprecedented move when he limited enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act — a federal law created to safeguard abortion clinics, patients and providers. He dismissed a handful of current ongoing investigations and pardoned 23 people for FACE convictions, effectively declaring open season on already vulnerable abortion clinics, patients and workers. He also rejoined the Geneva Consensus, an extreme global anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQIA pact created during the first Trump administration that aligns the U.S. with socially conservative countries, some of which have been accused of rampant human rights violations.
Trump, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, dismantled the Department of Health and Human Services. These cuts have gutted critical expert teams that monitored in vitro fertilization, tracked national maternal and infant health outcomes, as well as published key contraceptive guidelines for physicians. The cuts also pulled funding from gender-based research, including one study grant meant to protect pregnant women from domestic violence.
One Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team laid off in the larger DOGE cuts tracked maternal complications like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, all of which can have lifelong health consequences for women and their children. The elimination of this team means losing the only source of data about the health and behavior of women before, during and shortly after pregnancy.
“Health will likely get worse, and you may not even know it. We won’t see the effects until it’s too late,” one former official in the CDC’s reproductive health division told HuffPost earlier this month.
One of the most alarming moves that will have significant consequences is Trump’s decision to cut $65.8 million in family planning grants under Title X, a federal program dedicated to providing family-planning services for free or discounted prices to about 4 million low-income Americans every year. Title X has helped fund around 4,000 health clinics, supplying nearly 3 million low-income Americans in 2023 with reproductive health care including birth control, STI testing and cancer screenings. Despite GOP rhetoric, Title X funding cannot go toward abortions — meaning the Trump administration simply took away general health care for millions of Americans.
The news flew under the radar, likely because many people don’t understand what Title X is, and there has been a great deal of chaos in Trump’s first 100 days. But the funding cut has already significantly hindered operations at health centers across the country, including Planned Parenthood, an organization that is historically one of the largest Title X providers. At least six Planned Parenthood health centers have already shut down due to the Title X cuts the administration announced just last month.
“Abortion really was just the beginning,” said Metzger from Planned Parenthood. “An attack on Title X is an attack on birth control — that is what that program was funded for … None of these things are safe, they are all interconnected.”
Recently, the Trump administration joined a Supreme Court case alongside South Carolina, arguing that states should be allowed to exclude Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs, even for health care services outside of abortion care. Similar to Title X funding cuts, this move would effectively defund Planned Parenthood, a long-held GOP goal. The Trump administration’s unusual decision to join the case shows just how far they’re willing to go to decimate abortion access as well as birth control, STI testing and other vital reproductive health care.
One of the main focuses of Trump’s first 100 days in office has been attacking LGBTQIA communities, specifically transgender kids in women’s sports. And while some may not realize it, attacks on the trans community and attacks on reproductive justice are inherently linked. Trump’s anti-trans executive order contained “personhood” language, used often by extremist anti-abortion groups that believe life begins at conception and fetuses should have the same legal rights as born children. If fetal personhood ever became law, it would immediately create a total abortion ban and criminalize IVF, stem cell research and even some forms of birth control.
Trump has also lined his cabinet with abortion opponents, creating one of the most extreme anti-choice administrations in history.
Attorney General Pam Bondiinstructed the Department of Justice to dismiss a high-profile federal lawsuit over the right to emergency abortion care in Idaho — sending a clear message that the administration would rather pregnant women continue dying than offer safe abortion and miscarriage care. The federal law at the center of the suit, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requires hospitals that participate in Medicare (the majority of hospitals in the country) to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency. The person in Trump’s administration in charge of enforcing that law is Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former TV personality who is openlyanti-abortion and believes abortion decisions should be between “a woman, her doctors and her local political leaders.” Now that the lawsuit is dismissed, the Trump administration has the ability to rewrite federal EMTALA guidance, which would follow the far-right Project 2025 playbook perfectly.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is responsible for gutting several HHS agencies as well as cutting Title X funding. Trump tasked him with studying the safety of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortion, despite over two decades of safe and effective use by millions of Americans. Many of the HHS agencies Kennedy decimated were also the ones that would have studied mifepristone.
Kennedy himself could pull FDA approval of mifepristone, or FDA Commissioner Martin Makary could. The former Fox News contributor routinely spread anti-abortion misinformation before Trump made him head of the FDA. During Makary’s confirmation hearing, he refused to answer questions about his plans for mifepristone.
Legal challenges to reproductive freedom are sure to continue as the abortion opposition has only been emboldened since Trump took office. This means there will be more Supreme Court battles over abortion care — a frightening fact given the high court’s conservative majority and that John Sauer, well-known for his dogged opposition to abortion and birth control access, was recently confirmed as solicitor general, a position sometimes referred to as the “tenth justice.”
“President Trump has spent these first 100 days making it more dangerous to be pregnant in the United States, stacking every wing of his administration with anti-abortion extremists ready and willing to do his bidding,” Shannon Russell, federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told reporters in a Monday press call.
“Individually, these officials have great power,” Russell said. “Together, they’ll do long-lasting damage to our democracy and threaten people’s reproductive freedoms.”
