WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — One full year has passed since Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency, prompting pro-life leaders, activists, and observers to take stock of the ways in which his second term both resembles and differs from his first in its handling of life issues.
“Right out the gate, we saw some progress on the pro-life issue,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America spokeswoman Kelsey Pritchard told EWTN, while at the same time “we have also not seen progress in the one area that matters the most — and that’s on abortion drugs.” She noted the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) October 2025 approval of a new generic abortion pill, which the administration said was a formality out of its hands, but critics argue could have been halted.
Joseph Meaney of the National Catholic Bioethics Center warned of a “widespread feeling that the second Trump administration has seemed to deprioritize issues important to the pro-life community” while also crediting the administration for having “rolled back the Biden-era pro-abortion measures internationally and domestically (…) the federal government no longer funds research on fetal tissues and defends the conscience rights of health care professionals and others robustly.”
“The ‘cons’ side of the chart has been significant,” Jonathan Van Maren wrote in a recent assessment for LifeSiteNews, while at the same time “many of Trump’s pro-life appointees are working hard, where they can, to limit the scope of America’s abortion regime.”
Among the harshest reviews was that of Washington Examiner senior editor Peter Laffin, who declared Trump-Vance the “most anti-life Republican administration in history” due to the combination of its inaction on abortion pills and their distribution and concerning signs of compromises on abortion funding.
A more generous assessment came from Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins, who posted ahead of last week’s annual March for Life, “I’ve been getting non-stop calls from the mainstream media as the current theme of their stories is that the pro-life movement is disappointed in the Trump administration. Their goal: Depress the movement, a critical voting block, ahead of the midterm elections.”
“Let’s be clear, tremendous progress has been made. After just months of (Students for Life’s Action’s) lobbying, the process of debarring Planned Parenthood is now underway,” Hawkins said. “But more most (sic) be done as the DOJ’s lack of enforcement of the federal Comstock Act on the mailing of chemical abortion pills must be our next and urgent demand. We are eager to work with (the president) to make this happen.”
Live Action founder Lila Rose, who strongly criticized Trump ahead of the 2024 election and has since given his actions praise and critique on a case-by-case basis, recently met with administration officials at the White House, after which she said only that she was “looking forward to working with this administration to abolish abortion.”
Trump established a consistently pro-life record in his first term, which ended with a hotly disputed loss to Joe Biden in 2020, but began to turn after the 2022 midterm elections, in which he attempted to blame the abortion issue for GOP underperformance. During his 2024 run, he changed further still, ruling out a federal abortion ban in favor of leaving the issue to the states and changing the Republican Party platform’s longstanding pro-life language to reflect that preference.
He also declared he would not reverse former President Joe Biden’s decision not to enforce federal law against mailing abortion pills across state lines despite the tactic undermining state pro-life laws. Pro-lifers have hoped that stance might change with the administration’s pledge to review the data about the risks of abortion pills but have been frustrated by the lack of updates amid allegations (which the administration denies) that the review is being slow-walked until after the 2026 midterms.
Taxpayer funding of abortion has been the issue on which Trump has most strongly continued the pro-life record of his first term. Within weeks of returning to office, he began enforcing the Hyde Amendment, reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which forbids non-governmental organizations from using taxpayer dollars for most abortions abroad, and cut millions in pro-abortion subsidies by freezing U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending.
In July, Trump signed into law his controversial “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB), a wide-ranging policy package that includes a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to entities that commit abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life.
However, Trump recently revived pro-life worries when he told a gathering of House Republicans “you’ve got to be a little flexible on Hyde” for the sake of reaching a deal in the narrowly divided Congress on health care reform, an issue that has picked up steam in recent weeks due to the recent expiration of subsidies under the so-called “Affordable Care Act” (Obamacare). The declaration sparked alarm and protest from pro-life leaders and advocates, many of whom described Hyde as one of the federal government’s most basic and non-negotiable pro-life obligations.
Asked about the comment the next day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denied any change in position and touted the second Trump administration’s record so far of opposing taxpayer funding of abortion but did not specifically rule out some sort of compromise on Hyde in healthcare negotiations, leaving the controversy unresolved.
Another major shift began in February 2024, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualified as children in a wrongful death suit, thrusting the issue into the national spotlight. Most national Republicans rushed to declare their support for embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures (with just a handful of exceptions).
Leading the charge was Trump, who cast himself as a “leader on fertilization” and even promised to enact a new federal entitlement to IVF, whether through direct subsidy or insurance mandate (though he also suggested he would support religious exemptions to the latter). Once in office, the White House backed away from the idea of mandating IVF but said it still wanted to find a way to deliver on Trump’s campaign pledge. Last October, Trump announced he had struck a deal to reduce IVF costs and increase IVF “access” by (among other actions on lower prices for fertility drugs) creating a new benefit option specifically covering IVF and other fertility procedures for employers to offer their employees.
Speaking at the March for Life last week, Vice President JD Vance acknowledged “an elephant in the room” of pro-life discontent with the administration, but rather than addressing specific objections, framed it as a “fear” that “not enough progress has been made, that not enough has happened in the political arena, that we’re not going fast enough, that our politics have failed to answer the clarion call to life that this march represents and that all of us, I believe, hold in our hearts.”
“And I want you to know that I hear you, and that I understand there will inevitably be debates within this movement,” the vice president said. “My friends, I’d ask you to look where the fight for life stood just one decade ago and now look where it stands today. We have made tremendous strides over the last year, and we’re going to continue to make strides over the next three years to come. But I’m a realist. I know that there is still much road ahead to travel together.”
