Seven Ways the Trump Administration Has Made Pregnancy More Dangerous

As Trump fuels international chaos and headline-grabbing threats abroad, his administration has quietly hollowed out abortion rights at home … often with deadly consequences for women.

Originally published in Jill Filipovic’s Substack Throughline, under the headline, “A Year of Trump Administration Attacks on Abortion Rights.”

Trump has been in office for less than a year. The Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade less than three years ago. And today, if you are a woman in the United States, your rights change when you cross state lines—men’s rights do not. 

It’s easy to lose sight of just how debilitating this administration has been for reproductive rights, because they are doing so much else so loudly. (Apologies to Greenland.) But this administration has quietly attacked abortion rights from just about every angle. 

A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights makes clear just how aggressive they’ve been. A few highlights:

1. The Trump administration has effectively told emergency rooms and hospitals that they do not have to save pregnant women’s lives or preserve their health. 

Under a long-standing federal law, emergency rooms have to stabilize patients regardless of whether or not those patients can pay; if the hospital cannot provide the care the patient needs, they are required to stabilize them and then transfer them somewhere that can. For pregnant patients, this means that hospitals and ERs may sometimes have to provide abortion care: If a pregnant woman is in a health- or life-threatening emergency, in some cases, the only way to stabilize her is to end the pregnancy. But “pro-life” groups don’t like this law; they prefer to let women lose their uteruses, or hemorrhage, or wind up on a ventilator or nearly die of sepsis or other infection—they claim that abortion is never medically necessary, and threaten to prosecute any doctor who deems it so.

The result is that some women are dying; many more are nearly dying, particular women in the midst of miscarriages. In Texas, rates of sepsis infection among miscarrying women increased by more than 50 percent after their abortion ban—doctors are waiting until pregnant women have serious potentially deadly infections before giving them the care they need. And they’re doing this because new Trump administration rules do not require them to treat pregnant patients like all other people; pregnant women are a legal sub-category of person, not entitled the same requirement of care as everyone else. 

2. The Trump administration has launched a politically-motivated safety review of mifepristone, “the abortion pill,” seeking to challenge its approval by the FDA. 

Mifepristone is overwhelmingly safe, and has been used all over the world for decades now—for safe abortions, but also for a variety of other indications. The drug’s safety record is excellent, and the only reason to have the FDA review its approval is because it’s used for abortion—not because there are any real safety concerns. If the review results in a change to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, it would leave millions of women without access to a safe abortion option. 

3. The Trump administration destroyed millions of dollars of contraceptives bound for women in Africa, because antiabortion extremists claim that modern birth control is “abortifacient.” 

Millions of U.S. dollars were basically set on fire so that some of the world’s poorest women wouldn’t be able to plan their pregnancies. The result? A projected 1.5 million unplanned pregnancies. And that is in addition to the millions of people, including children, who lost basics like HIV treatment, contraception, prenatal care and infant care with the demise of USAID.

Today, starving women are birthing premature babies, and the U.S. has barely saved a cent. (The “pro-life” movement is also nowhere to be found when it comes to saving the lives of these babies.) 

4. The Trump administration froze contraceptive funding for American women. 

Millions of women have lost access to contraception and reproductive healthcare between Trump’s Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill and his stripping of Title X family planning funds from clinics across the country. 

5. The Trump administration stripped reproductive healthcare from veterans—including rape victims. 

Veterans who are pregnant from rape, or face severe risks to their health from carrying a pregnancy to term, can no longer get safe abortions through their VA health insurance thanks to new Trump administration rules. These are women who have served our country, and have been targeted by Trump’s team. 

6. Trump pardoned violent antiabortion criminals. 

Some two dozen people who had been criminally prosecuted for attacking patients and healthcare workers, vandalizing abortion clinics, and stealing fetal tissue were pardoned by Trump. Several are already back in court for further criminal acts. And since the Trump administration announced it basically wouldn’t prosecute antiabortion protesters so long as they didn’t kill or seriously injure someone (keyword there is “seriously”), antiabortion extremists have gotten more aggressive and more violent. 

7. “Pro-life” prosecutors have brought more than 400 cases against pregnant women, new mothers or women who lost pregnancies. 

The details of these cases vary, but they include criminal prosecutions of women who they suspected were seeking abortions; women who possessed abortion medication; women who miscarried and didn’t dispose of fetal remains in ways prosecutors deemed acceptable; women who were suspected of using drugs while pregnant (even if there was no evidence of harm to the baby); and women who didn’t get prenatal care. These are overwhelmingly poor women, and overwhelmingly women who need help, not jail time. 

There is much more to come. Donald Trump does not really care about abortion one way or the other, but he is happy to let the antiabortion extremists in his administration and in his party do what they like, so long as it doesn’t blow back on him. And right now, the public is either tuned out of the overwhelming craziness, or focused on the shock-and-awe distraction tactics: invading Venezuela, threatening to take Greenland, all steering our eyeballs away from the president’s own corruption and criminality. 

Antiabortion groups are working hard to get the federal government to pull abortion pills from the market. They are trying to get those drugs deemed “forever chemicals” so they might use environmental regulations to ban them. They continue to scheme on the Comstock Act, a century-old anti-obscenity law that could regulate abortion-related speech. They are continuing to make health care more expensive and less accessible, leaving pregnant women and newborns particularly vulnerable. Women have already died thanks to abortion bans. That was a known, predicted, baked-in outcome. And the “pro-life” movement, empowered by the Trump administration, is gunning for more.