President Donald Trump has ordered his administration to block global aid recipients from talking to their patients about abortion — a move that could weaken reproductive health care around the world.
The move, announced Friday in a presidential memorandum, revives a policy known as the “global gag rule” that Trump and many other Republican presidents have implemented. Already, contractors who receive money from U.S. foreign aid cannot use it to directly support abortion services. But they can tell people that this option is available.
Trump is not the first Republican president to implement this policy, but his interpretation, which matches the approach he took in his previous term, is the broadest. Other Republicans have only applied the gag rule to foreign aid specific to family planning services. But the Trump regime affects any global health funding distributed by the United States.
The broad scope of the gag rule means its implementation could weaken global efforts to prevent the spread of HIV, promote contraception and combat diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.
In the past, similar gag rules have led to the closure of family planning clinics in other countries and fewer people receiving contraceptives. Some health centers dropped their contraceptive offerings in response to this policy, leaving people without local birth control options. This rule has also been linked to a higher rate of unwanted pregnancies and abortions, including in countries where this procedure is not legal.
Also Friday, Trump issued an executive order that further strengthens the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal dollars from being used to fund abortion. The order reverses two Biden administration executive actions, one requiring the government to expand access to abortion and another defining abortion as health care.
The moves come amid growing speculation about why the president failed to take action on abortion policy during his first days back in office. Earlier Friday, Trump addressed the annual March for Life via video, but did not mention any of the commitment to specific abortion policies that the groups have been pushing him to adopt.
