A report compiling harmful actions taken by US President Donald Trump against reproductive rights was released today by the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), a legal organization defending reproductive rights globally. It’s a long list, including policy positions, personnel appointments, website takedowns, administrative changes, government agency shutdowns, and funding cuts.
Like Human Rights Watch’s feature detailing 100 human rights harms done during Trump’s first 100 days in office, this list is hard to summarize because so many dimensions of reproductive health and rights have been impacted, including infertility treatment, abortion care, family planning, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases – even the availability of basic health information on government websites.
While some of these actions made headlines, the CRR list highlights that many others have gone unnoticed amid the barrage of Trump-related news. Cuts to Title X grant recipients, including Planned Parenthood clinics, mean some clinics are now struggling to stay open. These funding recipients help the US government take steps towards realizing wider enjoyment of the right to health with contraception, cervical cancer screenings, and other lifesaving services for people who have no or few options for affordable care.
Cuts to the US Department of Health and Human Services “include[d] the majority of employees in the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health” whose work was, according to one former staffer quoted in the CCR report, essentially “eliminated overnight.” Additionally, the administration put on administrative leave the team that has collected pregnancy data since 1988 to better understand maternal and infant health, and that provided important information on why Black women have worse maternal health outcomes than white women in the US.
The report also describes Trump’s efforts to entirely roll back efforts to recognize and accommodate people’ gender identity, thereby denying the existence of transgender people.
It also notes his use of executive orders to define when personhood begins, a foundation for wider efforts to impose restrictions on abortion.
Such highhandedness would seem ridiculous were it not so frightening. They will significantly worsen the health and wellbeing of people across the US, a country with an expensive and inadequate healthcare system with cruel racial inequities, and which leaves many low-income people obliged to ignore their health care to put food on the table.
CRR has done an important service by making this damage visible. The question is what policymakers will do to halt this assault.
