A Year of Trump Administration Attacks on Abortion Rights
With so much in the news, don't lose sight of how women are being made second-class citizens -- and sometimes paying with our lives.
Trump has been in office for less than a year. The Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade less than three years ago. And today, if you are a woman in the United States, your rights change when you cross state lines — men’s rights do not.
It’s easy to lose sight of just how debilitating this administration has been for reproductive rights, because they are doing so much else so loudly (apologies to Greenland). But this administration has quietly attacked abortion rights from just about every angle. A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights makes clear just how aggressive they’ve been. A few highlights:
The Trump administration has effectively told emergency rooms and hospitals that they do not have to save pregnant women’s lives or preserve their health. Under a long-standing federal law, emergency rooms have to stabilize patients regardless of whether or not those patients can pay; if the hospital cannot provide the care the patient needs, they are required to stabilize them and then transfer them somewhere that can. For pregnant patients, this means that hospitals and ERs may sometimes have to provide abortion care: If a pregnant woman is in a health- or life-threatening emergency, in some cases, the only way to stabilize her is to end the pregnancy. But “pro-life” groups don’t like this law; they prefer to let women lose their uteruses, or hemorrhage, or wind up on a ventilator, or nearly die of sepsis or other infection — they claim that abortion is never medically necessary, and threaten to prosecute any doctor who deems it so. The result is that some women are dying; many more are nearly dying, particular women in the midst of miscarriages. In Texas, rates of sepsis infection among miscarrying women increased by more than 50% after their abortion ban — doctors are waiting until pregnant women have serious potentially deadly infections before giving them the care they need. And they’re doing this because new Trump administration rules do not require them to treat pregnant patients like all other people; pregnant women are a legal sub-category of person, not entitled the same requirement of care as everyone else.
The Trump administration has launched a politically-motivated safety review of mifepristone, “the abortion pill,” seeking to challenge its approval by the FDA. Mifepristone is overwhelmingly safe, and has been used all over the world for decades now — for safe abortions, but also for a variety of other indications. The drug’s safety record is excellent, and the only reason to have the FDA review its approval is because it’s used for abortion — not because there are any real safety concerns. If the review results in a change to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, it would leave millions of women without access to a safe abortion option.
The Trump administration destroyed millions of dollars of contraceptives bound for women in Africa, because anti-abortion extremists claim that modern birth control is “abortifacient.” Millions of US dollars were basically set on fire so that some of the world’s poorest women wouldn’t be able to plan their pregnancies. The result? A projected 1.5 million unplanned pregnancies. And that is in addition to the millions of people, including children, who lost basics like HIV treatment, contraception, prenatal care, and infant care with the demise of USAID. Today, starving women are birthing premature babies, and the US has barely saved a cent (the “pro-life” movement is also nowhere to be found when it comes to saving the lives of these babies).
