President Trump has taken office, and some of his initial executive orders closely reflect Project 2025, an authoritarian agenda that includes severe rollbacks on women’s reproductive rights. Trump’s close ties to Elon Musk and other pronatalist figures are also a cause for great concern. Here we explore the prominent figures of U.S. pronatalism and how Project 2025 represents a war on women’s rights.

The first Trump administration introduced a wave of policies that restricted reproductive rights and access to healthcare both domestically in the U.S. and worldwide. The Biden administration reversed a lot of those policies and helped to repair the U.S.’s reputation as one of the largest funders of sexual and reproductive healthcare worldwide.  

But this is now Trump 2.0. And it’s widely predicted that the Trump administration will not only reinstate its previous policies but go even further in restricting women’s reproductive rights. 

Global Gag Rule

During his first 2016-2020 administration, President Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy, more widely known as the Global Gag Rule. A policy that bans U.S. global health funding from supporting any non-U.S. organisation that provides abortion care, information or referrals, even if this work is separately funded by non-U.S. funds.  

Abortion is an important part of reproductive and sexual healthcare provision, that encompasses not only a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy but also in some cases a necessary medical treatment. Pregnancy complications, including placental abruption, preeclampsia or eclampsia, and cardiac conditions, may be so severe that abortion is the only measure to preserve a woman’s health or save her life. 

The Global Gag Rule effectively strong-arms global health providers that rely on U.S. funding to stop providing abortion care which has devastating impacts on reproductive health services in lower-income countries. Under the first Trump administration, many family planning programmes had to shut down and access to contraceptives was restricted, which led to women suffering from lack of adequate healthcare ultimately causing a rise in preventable deaths.  

President Trump will likely reinstate the Global Gag Policy. Many pro-choice activists predict that President Trump will further expand the Global Gag Rule to encompass all U.S. foreign assistance, which will be a devastating blow for the international health community.  

The end of Roe v Wade

During Trump’s previous presidency, he appointed three anti-abortion justices to the United States Supreme Court, which resulted in the overturning of Roe v Wade. The former legal precedent that ruled the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an abortion. Following Roe v Wade being overturned, 12 states have issued total abortion bans.  

In addition, 29 states have abortion bans based on gestational duration, with four states having abortion bans after six weeks. A timeframe so narrow that many women don’t even realise they are pregnant before their right to have an abortion is removed.  

This has caused a U.S. maternal mortality crisis, with preventable deaths caused by women unable to access abortion care.  

There are now fears that the Trump administration will try to enact a national abortion ban, removing the right of all American women to have access to safe abortions. This would present a boldly hostile attack on women’s reproductive rights, stripping them of the right to be in control of their own bodies.  

Hamstrung the UNFPA

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is the UN’s division focused on reproductive and sexual healthcare. The UNFPA’s work is vital, as it’s the biggest provider of family planning and reproductive healthcare services in more than 150 countries.  

However, the last Trump administration blocked funding to the UNFPA, a significant blow that hindered its work as the U.S. has historically been one of its biggest donors. This time around there is concern that the Trump administration will be even more hostile to the UNFPA. And whilst the previous Biden administration increased their funding, the sudden block from the U.S. under Trump will stall the organisation’s progress in trying to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, including ending unmet need for family planning.  

The manifesto of the Trump-Vance government suggests that President Trump may introduce other policies to further restrict the UNFPA’s work.

Project 2025

Project 2025 is a 900-page “wish list”: a set of policy proposals that would expand presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision for the U.S., originally put together by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. 

President Trump previously tried to distance himself from the controversial publication on the campaign trail. Many experts believe Trump is likely to advance its goals following the appointment of certain officials to his government.  

Project 2025 is aggressively anti-choice, posing an existential threat to women’s reproductive rights.  

The policy proposals

The Guttmacher Institute has reviewed Project 2025 and identified the policy proposals that pose the greatest threat to sexual and reproductive rights. 

• Blocking access to abortion pills. Project 2025 proposes several strategies for removing access to mifepristone, a safe medication that is the most common regimen for medical abortion in the United States.  

• Anti-Abortion Taskforce. The plan proposes changing the Department of Health and Human Services into the “Department of Life”. It will also introduce an anti-abortion task force to replace the existing Reproductive Healthcare Task Force and a newly created position of “Special Representative for Domestic Women’s Health” to lead anti-abortion policy efforts across agencies. 

• Nation Wide Abortion Plan. Project 2025 also suggests the Trump administration could bypass the FDA and effectively ban medication abortion—and potentially all abortions—through enforcement of the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law that prohibits mailing anything “intended for producing abortion.”  

• Pressuring the UN. Project 2025 encourages the use of U.S. influence at the United Nations to remove language “promoting abortion” from UN documents, policy statements and technical literature. In this way, it seeks to use the U.S.’s large presence in international affairs, to try and influence the work of the United Nations and rollback progress made in the provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare worldwide.

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This is part one of The Faces of U.S. Pronatalism And the War on Women’s Rights.