President Trump on Friday reinstated a longstanding Republican anti-abortion policy known as the “Mexico City Rule,” which bars federal funding from any non-governmental organization abroad that performs or promotes abortion.
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 was overturned by the court in 2022.
Federal law already prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to support abortion services abroad. But in 1984 President Ronald Reagan went a step further, blocking foreign aid to nongovernmental organizations that discuss abortion as part of family planning services or support abortion rights, even if those groups do not use American tax dollars to they do.
In the four decades since then, politics has had a seesaw history. Democratic presidents, including Joseph R. Biden Jr. has revoked it and the Republicans have reinstated it. Valid for 21 of the last 40 years.
That Mr. Trump reinstated the ban is no 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 Supreme Court justices 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 has to lean toward the right wing of his party, particularly because his pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has mixed facts about abortion. During his visit with senators on Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Kennedy promised Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, that he would support restoring the policy as part of a broad anti-abortion agenda.
“He committed to me to restore President Trump’s proliferation policies at HHS,” wrote Mr. Hawley on social media, using the initials for the Department of Health and Human Services. “This includes restoring Mexico City’s policy and ending taxpayer funding for domestic abortions.”
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 “the position of Mr. Kennedy on abortion is that it is always a woman’s right to choose,” adding, “He does not support legislation that prohibits 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 to a certain point,” he wrote. “I think that point should be when the baby is viable outside the womb.”
Reproductive rights advocates say Mexico City’s policy has devastating consequences for women abroad, increasing the number of unintended pregnancies, curtailing much-needed family planning programs and sometimes leading women to seek unsafe abortions, which are an important cause of maternal mortality.
The last time Mr. Trump reinstated the policy when he first took office in 2017, but also expanded it by ordering 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 abortion groups.
