(LifeSiteNews) — The first year of the second Trump administration has been a mixed bag for the pro-life movement.
The “cons” side of the chart has been significant. Trump has consistently pushed for IVF, pitching a range of policies and urging the Republican Party to “own” the issue. He has advocated compromise on the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of tax dollars for abortion and has saved millions of lives. Worst of all, his administration has approved a generic new abortion pill that will “normalize” pill abortions even further and make it increasingly accessible even as the percentage of such abortions exceeds 60% of the U.S. total.
All of this must be called out by pro-lifers, and the political arm of the movement must fight these policies. They have been doing so, and there is evidence that pro-life lobbying made Trump’s IVF policies significantly less damaging than they might have been.
We should also not be surprised. As I have written in this space many times, Donald Trump is a pragmatic, pro-choice politician who has stacked his administration with many pro-life figures and sees the pro-life movement as a political ally without sharing many of our principles. Trump made this crystal clear during the 2024 election, when he removed the pro-life plank from the GOP platform, advocated against six-week abortion bans, and emphasized his support for the abortion pill.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, was anything but pragmatic. She visited an abortion clinic while serving as vice president, put abortionists on stage during her campaign, and made abortion central to her pitch to voters. A mobile abortion clinic was even set up outside the Democratic National Convention. Harris saw pro-lifers as the enemy and, if elected, would have aggressively pursued both the prosecution of pro-lifers and the expansion of the American abortion regime.
A report from the abortion activist outfit the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), on the other hand, highlights the “pros” side of the Trump administration’s first year. CRR claims that “the Trump administration has further decimated abortion access during his first year back in office,” including:
- The pardoning of pro-life activists convicted of violating the FACE Act.
- Implementing “a new policy that would prevent veterans on VA health insurance from having abortions even in cases of rape, incest, or severe health risks.”
- “Forcing clinics to close or reduce services nationwide by taking away their Medicaid funding. About 50 Planned Parenthood health centers have since closed.”
- Launching “an FDA investigation into the abortion pill, which could make it much harder to access.”
- Calling “birth control an “abortifacient” in order to “destroy millions of dollars in contraception headed for African countries,” which CRR claims could lead to over “1.5 million unintended pregnancies.”
“Too many people wrongly believe that President Trump is done attacking abortion access, and that overturning Roe v. Wade was his endgame,” said Nancy Northup, president & CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “But in his first year back in office, the Trump administration is not ‘leaving it to the states’ to decide abortion policy but wielding federal power to go after abortion access even in states where abortion is legal.”
“The result has already been a reduction of abortion clinics in the U.S. and the looming fear that the FDA will soon gut access to abortion pills, which have been a lifeline in post-Roe America,” Northup continued. “This report should be a wake-up call to Americans that the threat to further limit access to abortion throughout the nation is real and must be met with vigorous opposition.”
In short, many of Trump’s pro-life appointees are working hard, where they can, to limit the scope of America’s abortion regime — and they are doing so within an administration led by a president who is a fair-weather friend to the pro-life movement at best. At the 2024 March for Life, mere weeks after the inauguration, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Vice President JD Vance all showed up to express their support for the movement. The pro-life movement still has powerful political allies, and in a post-Roe America and a fractious and divided MAGA, that is essential.
