WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 20: President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

In a move that global health workers say will likely have devastating consequences for women and girls throughout the world, President Donald Trump has reinstated a policy that bans foreign aid workers from offering information about abortion, and doubled down on an existing domestic policy that bans federal funding for abortion.

The so-called Mexico City Policy, which Trump reinstated Friday night with an executive order, was first introduced in 1984 under Republican President Ronald Reagan, and bans foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive U.S. family planning funds from promoting abortion as a method of family planning and from abortion-related counseling and referrals. It is known by reproductive rights advocates as the “global gag rule,” and it has been rescinded and reinstated as presidential administrations have changed parties for many years.

“We saw the devastating impact of the global gag rule during the last Trump administration when contraception and vital reproductive services were cut off. There was a spike in pregnancy-related deaths, reproductive coercion, and gender inequality worldwide,” said Rachana Desai Martin, chief government and external relations officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a statement. “Many clinics and health programs shuttered, leaving vulnerable populations with nowhere to get birth control, pregnancy care and other vital health services.”

Reinstatement of the policy was prescribed in Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint document authored by the Heritage Foundation and many other organizations, including several anti-abortion groups.

“To stop U.S. foreign aid from supporting the global abortion industry, the next conservative administration should issue an executive order that, at a minimum, reinstates [the policy] and … closes loopholes by applying the policy to all foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid, and improving its enforcement,” page 261 of the document reads. “The executive order … should be drafted broadly to apply to all foreign assistance.”

The executive order includes the statement, “I direct the Secretary of State, in coordination with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to the extent allowable by law, to implement a plan to extend the requirements of the reinstated memorandum to global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies.”

Advocates within foreign assistance organizations said the change will affect not only abortion access, but comprehensive reproductive health services, including HIV prevention and treatment, contraception access, screening for sexually transmitted diseases and cancers, and treatments for other infectious diseases.

“An expanded Mexico City Policy will have wide-reaching impacts on women and girls’ access to life-saving healthcare,” Janeen Madan Keller, policy fellow and deputy director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, said in a statement. “As research shows, the Mexico City Policy reduces access to contraception which — counter to the policy’s intended goal — leads to more unplanned pregnancies and higher abortion rates.”

Madan Keller added that when Trump reinstated the rule during his first term in 2017, other donors were able to bolster the United Nations Population Fund’s budget and blunt any negative effects.

“However, with many donors now slashing aid budgets, it’s unclear whether they would cover the shortfall,” she said.

On the same day as the executive orders, the Trump administration rejoined the so-called Geneva Consensus Declaration, a global agreement launched by the U.S. and five other countries in 2020, which states that there is no international right to abortion and countries are not obligated to finance or facilitate it, according to a document obtained by Politico. The pact also includes Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia and Uganda.

Hyde Amendment

Trump issued another executive order on Friday titled, “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” referring to a federal provision prohibiting the use of federal funds such as Medicaid to pay for abortions. Hyde does, however, allow funding in cases of rape, incest or to save a patient’s life. The order said the prior Democratic administration of President Joe Biden “embedded forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions” in a variety of federal programs, and rescinded two of Biden’s executive orders from 2022 that aimed to increase access to abortion.

Trump signed the orders at the end of a week where he was mostly silent on abortion. But after days of lobbying by anti-abortion movement leaders, Trump on Thursday pardoned convicted abortion-clinic blockaders and earlier Friday gave a last-minute video speech at the anti-abortion March for Life.

Project 2025 references the Hyde Amendment several times, citing Biden’s 2022 executive order that allowed the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary to find ways to assist pregnant people traveling across state lines to receive abortion care. The Biden administration subsequently interpreted Hyde to only apply to the abortion procedure itself.

Page 471 of the document calls for HHS to withdraw that guidance and for the U.S. Department of Justice to withdraw and disavow its interpretation of the amendment that was issued in September 2022. It also says HHS should complete a full audit to determine compliance with the amendment and permanently codify the Hyde Amendment in law rather than approving it as part of an appropriations process every year.

Republican U.S. Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana and Roger Wicker of Mississippi introduced a bill in early January to codify the amendment and establish “a single, government-wide standard that bars federal tax dollars from financing abortions.” It’s unclear if that bill is an attempt to fully cut Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, which relies heavily on those funds to provide sexual and reproductive health services like contraception and screenings, including in states with abortion bans. Cutting that funding is a directive from Project 2025, as well.