President Trump on Friday reinstated a longstanding Republican anti-abortion policy known as the “Mexico City Rule,” which bars federal funding from going to any overseas nongovernmental organization that performs or promotes abortions.
The move came after he addressed thousands of abortion opponents in Washington on Friday to mark the 52nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which created a national right to abortion and which the court overturned in 2022.
Federal law already bans the use of taxpayer dollars to support abortion services abroad. But in 1984 President Ronald Reagan went one step further, blocking foreign aid to nongovernmental organizations that discuss abortion as part of family planning services, or advocate abortion rights, even if those groups are not using American tax dollars to do so.
In the four decades since, the policy has had a seesaw history. Democratic presidents, including Joseph R. Biden Jr., have revoked it and Republicans have reinstated it. It has been in effect for 21 of the past 40 years.
That Mr. Trump reinstated the ban is not a surprise. When he ran for president in 2016, he took a strong anti-abortion stance, winning the support of Christian conservatives by promising to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe. In the two and a half years since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a more complicated issue for Republicans, and Mr. Trump did not make it a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
But Mr. Trump still needs to tend to his party’s right wing, particularly because his pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a muddled record on abortion. While visiting with senators on Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Kennedy promised Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, that he would support reinstatement of the policy as part of a broad anti-abortion agenda.
“He committed to me to reinstate President Trump’s prolife policies at HHS,” Mr. Hawley wrote on social media, using the initials for the Department of Health and Human Services. “That includes reinstating the Mexico City policy & ending taxpayer funding for abortions domestically.”
In April 2023, when he was running for president, Mr. Kennedy said he would support a federal ban on abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy, but then quickly backtracked. His campaign released a statement saying that Mr. Kennedy’s “position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose,” adding, “He does not support legislation banning abortion.”
The following year, he posted a lengthy message on social media outlining his views. “I support the emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point,” he wrote. “I believe that point should be when the baby is viable outside the womb.”
Advocates for reproductive rights say the Mexico City policy has a devastating effect on women overseas, driving up the number of unintended pregnancies, scaling back much-needed family planning programs and sometimes leading women to seek unsafe abortions, which are a major cause of maternal mortality.
The last time Mr. Trump reinstated the policy, when he first took office in 2017, he also expanded it by directing the State Department to identify additional organizations that might fall under the ban. Two years later, in 2019, Mr. Trump further expanded the policy to bar federal funding for overseas groups that give money to other foreign groups that perform abortions.
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