President Joe Biden will repeal a major anti-abortion policy imposed by the Trump administration on Thursday on an executive order, making it easier for organizations abroad to obtain the necessary funding to provide reproductive health services.
The policy – known primarily as the ‘global gag rule’ or Mexico City policy, prohibited international groups receiving US aid from conducting, facilitating or even discussing abortions.
Biden also announced that his government would “act immediately to consider whether to declare another, very restrictive, anti-abortion policy, sometimes referred to as the ‘domestic gag rule’, ‘repealed’. This rule is aimed at the planned parenting by prohibiting the recipients of title X family planning from government funding to act or refer for abortion.
“For President Biden, it’s personal,” reads 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 knowing he or she has access to affordable, high-quality health care.”
During his four years in office, Trump instituted and supported policies that deeply restricted access to reproductive rights in the United States, and encouraged state and federal government legislators to implement and sometimes implement highly restrictive anti-abortion policies. .
Biden’s actions regarding abortion so early in his term indicate to abortion rights advocates that he is committed to undoing the legacy of his predecessor on the issue.
The Global Gag Rule
Since President Ronald Reagan first applied the rule in 1984, it has become somewhat of a ritual for every Democratic president to recall it and every Republican to reinstate it. It usually takes place at the beginning of the term, around the end of the January anniversary of Row against Wade.
But former president Donald Trump, as he does, has taken his version of the rule two steps further. Former Republican presidents have only applied the rule to international non-governmental family planning organizations, but Trump expanded the rule during his first few days in 2017 in 2017, naming it “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” and applying to any organization that provides U.S. funding receive. and “offer or promote abortion as a method of birth control,” no matter what their main focus was.
Then, in March of 2019, Trump expanded the rule even further and applied it to local organizations supported by groups that receive U.S. funding, increasing the amount of funding by about $ 600 million to about $ 12 billion, the research organization said. Guttmacher found. Not only did thousands of international aid organizations cut off their reproductive health programs, but they also had to cut off all organizations that helped them fund abortion.
Just before the election, in September 2020, Trump tried a third time to broaden the effect of the rule by proposing an amendment that would apply it not only to organizations receiving money from the US, but also any organization contracted with the U.S. government. This amendment, which awaited even before Thursday’s announcement, would have affected more health organizations worldwide than any version of the rule previously enacted.
Even without introducing the latest version of the rule, Trump’s excessive gag rule has affected millions of people around the world, reproductive rights and health care organizations have found. Marie Stopes International, a global reproductive health organization that lost its money due to the rule, estimates that this loss led to about 6 million unwanted pregnancies, 1.8 million unsafe abortions and 20,000 maternal deaths.
In a review of the rule released in August, Trump’s own State Department found that the rule had unintended consequences. Dozens of organizations did not want to comply with the rule and lost their money as a result, and this ‘in some cases’, the review said, had an impact on the delivery of health care, including for HIV / Aids, voluntary family planning reproductive health, tuberculosis and nutrition programming. ”
Title X
During his campaign, Biden repeatedly promised to ban Trump’s rule on the planned parenting and other organizations that provide or refer women for abortions to receive Title X funding. Thursday’s executive order does not repeal the rule in itself, but it is a first step, the president said. The order he plans to sign Thursday afternoon will order the Department of Health and Human Services to review Trump’s title X policy with a view to repealing it.
The policy, finalized in 2019 by the Trump administration, was the final version of several attempts to deprive Planned Parenthood of funding. However, the money that Trump was deprived of – federal grants for family planning – did not fund abortions, but mainly supported low-income patients who could not afford to pay for reproductive health care out of pocket. The Hyde Amendment – a federal law against which Biden was a strong supporter of his Democratic primary campaign in 2019 – prohibits any government money from paying directly for abortion. Title X Money mainly provides access to contraception, sex education, STI testing, cancer research and antenatal services.
But Trump’s plan worked. Planned Parenthood did not receive any more money from the program, and reduced its ability to reduce contraceptives by almost half. Guttmacher has also lost nearly 1,000 other reproductive health clinics to their title X funding.
Other reproduction rights promises
This is not the first action for abortion rights by the brand new Biden government. On the actual anniversary of Roe v. Wade, On January 22, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement committing to the landmark decision to legalize nationwide abortion legislation. If Congress succeeds, it would mean that if the Conservative judges appointed by Trump in the Supreme Court were to reverse Roe, a federal law would ensure that abortions across the country remain legal.
During his campaign, Biden promised to reissue a guideline that would prevent states from refusing Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. that he “will ensure that his justice department does everything in its power to stop the outcome of state laws that so blatantly violate the constitutional right to abortion.”
But advocates for abortion rights want more. Guttmacher called on Biden to increase funding for the international family planning programs that have just been released from the gag rule. And Planned Parenthood has released a video urging the Biden government to push through the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (HER) legislation enacted by Congress Democrats that would permanently eliminate the global gag rule.