Trump’s Victory Will Doom What’s Left Of Abortion Rights In The U.S.

Donald Trump’s projected triumph in the presidential race this week likely spells doom for what’s left of abortion rights in the United States.

In the first presidential election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Americans’ views shifted farther right. The GOP won control of the Senate and Trump is currently on course to be the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades. Despite the 7 out of 10 states that voted to protect abortion care, voters still supported a candidate who will likely decimate women’s reproductive health care.

Trump shied away from his anti-abortion record on the campaign trail: softening his rhetoric around reproductive rights, waffling on a national abortion ban and peddling his lie that “everyone” wanted Roe repealed. When Roe fell, Republicans quickly realized that rolling back abortion rights is inherently unpopular; the seven wins from pro-choice ballot measures this election season is proof of Americans’ thoughts 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 a brazenly racist campaign this time around, holds the keys to women’s bodily autonomy, and he will use them to rewind the clock on hard-earned reproductive rights. 

We know what Trump will do next on abortion because of Project 2025 ― an extreme policy agenda that lays out next steps for a Trump second term. The plan conjures images of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by dismantling sex education, monitoring some pregnancies, threatening access to birth control 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’s back in power he will very likely bring them with him. 

As president, Trump will be able to enforce the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending “obscene” materials in the mail, including anything “intended for producing abortion.” The Comstock Act will effectively create a backdoor abortion ban overnight by criminalizing sending abortion pills in the mail ― an access point that has been critical since the repeal of federal abortion protections. Trump won’t need Congress to sign off, and it will impact people in every state, even states that have abortion protections. 

Trump’s allies have made it clear time and time again that they plan to use the Comstock Act to circumvent any government oversight that could stop them from banning abortion nationwide. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas’ bounty hunter abortion ban, told The New York Times earlier this year. Mitchell signaled that anti-abortion groups have intentionally remained quiet about the Comstock Act because it’s such a powerful weapon for Republicans. 

Trump claimed he won’t enforce the Comstock Act, after months of pressing questions. But his own running mate, Sen. JD Vance wrote a letter in 2023 urging the Department of Justice to use Comstock to criminalize “the reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail.” 

Under Project 2025, Trump allies plan to rename the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to the Department For Life where a task force would oversee all anti-abortion efforts throughout the federal government. Though Trump has distanced himself from the far-right policy agenda, the plan mentions him over 300 times and was authored by long-time Trump advisers who were part of his 2017 administration or his campaign team. 

Trump’s administration will also appoint some of the most anti-abortion extremists to power. He was able to appoint three Supreme Court justices during his first administration ― 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 of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions. The Biden administration safeguarded and defended access to mifepristone in front of the Supreme Court this summer. But a Trump-appointed FDA commissioner would likely do the opposite and take mifepristone out of circulation. Mifepristone, with another abortion drug called misoprostol, are used in more than 60% of abortions nationwide. By taking mifepristone off shelves, Trump could effectively implement an abortion ban in both red and blue states. 

He will also appoint a new attorney general — someone who could choose to wield the power of the Justice Department against abortion seekers. Trump floated Texas attorney general Ken Paxton as a name on his shortlist this summer. Paxton is an infamous abortion opponent who last year petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to block a woman from getting a medically necessary abortion. He also recently sued to access medical records of Texas women seeking out-of-state abortions. This is who could be the next U.S. attorney general. 

Mitchell, the attorney behind Texas’ six-week abortion ban, has been floated as a candidate for solicitor general for Trump’s administration, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The solicitor general answers to the attorney general, but still holds a massive amount of power, including deciding what cases the government will appeal to the Supreme Court. Mitchell is an infamous abortion opponent who has weaponized circumventing traditional legal avenues in pursuit of restricting reproductive rights. He also represented Trump in the before the Supreme Court. 

Another hint at how the Trump may seek to ban abortion was quietly tucked into a line about the Constitution’s 14th Amendment included in the Republican Party platform released during his campaign. The amendment was originally created to protect formerly enslaved Black people by ratifying that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Trump’s party platform signaled that the GOP hopes to extend those rights to embryos and fetuses which, when taken to its logical conclusion, is a call for a total abortion ban nationwide. 

Beyond abortion, anyone with the capacity for pregnancy would be vulnerable if the federal government established fetal personhood; it would endanger vital reproductive health care including miscarriage management, birth control and in vitro fertilization, as well as increasing the likelihood of pregnancy criminalization across the board. 

American women aren’t the only ones who will suffer from a Trump administration. Women and pregnant people around the world will, too. Trump will undoubtedly reinstate the global gag rule, a policy that bars the federal government from offering U.S. aid to any international health organization that also provides information on abortion care. The rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, was created under President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and, since then, every Democratic president has revoked it and every Republican president has put it back into place. 

So it wasn’t a surprise when Trump reinstated the gag rule in 2017 during his first term, but his impact far out-paced past Republican administration because he expanded the global gag rule multiple times. Until 2017, the gag rule was only applied to the portion of U.S. funds that went to family planning services, but when Trump got into office, he expanded the rule to include restrictions on all global health funding ― not just dollars for reproductive health care. This means that the gag rule dictated what foreign NGOs can do with their own money, too, not just with U.S. federal aid.

The 2017 Trump administration again broadened the policy in 2019 to cut aid for groups that donated to other organizations that mention abortion. Essentially, this move hindered NGOs from receiving money for essential services like access to clean water, sanitation services 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 around the world when he created and signed on to the Geneva Consensus Declaration ― a radical coalition that declared there was “no international right” to abortion and undermined same-sex couples by reaffirming traditional family roles. The coalition broke from the U.N. consensus and included several countries that the U.N. has accused of human rights violations. 

Trump was voted out of the White House in 2020 while trying to expand the global gag rule for a third time. It’s extremely likely that once Trump is sworn in, he will continue where he left off.