President Trump on Friday reinstated a long-standing Republican anti-abortion policy known as the “Mexico City Rule,” which bars federal funding from going to any nongovernmental organization abroad 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 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, who created a national right to abortion and which the Court overturned 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 don’t use tax dollars Americans to do it.
In the four decades since then, politics has had a see-saw history. Democratic presidents, including Joseph R. Biden Jr., have revoked it, and Republicans have reinstated it. It has been in place 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 justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn the eggs. In the two and a half years since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a more complicated issue for Republicans, and Mr. Trump has not made it a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
But Mr. Trump still needs to lean toward his party’s right wing, particularly because his pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a mixed record on abortion. While visiting senators on Capitol Hill last month, Kennedy promised Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, that he would support reinstating the policy as part of a broad anti-abortion agenda.
“He is committed to restoring President Trump’s prolife policies at HHS,” Hawley wrote on social media, using the initials for the Department of Health and Human Services. “This includes reinstating the Mexico City policy and ending taxpayer funding for abortions nationwide.”
In April 2023, when he was running for president, 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 “Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always a woman’s right to choose,” adding, “he does not support legislation that bans 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 believe this point should be when the baby is viable outside the womb.”
Reproductive rights advocates say the Mexico City policy has a devastating effect on women abroad, increasing the number of unintended pregnancies, scaling back much-needed family planning programs and sometimes leading women to seek unsafe abortions, which are one of the main causes of maternal mortality.
The last time 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 could fall under the ban. Two years later, in 2019, Trump further expanded the policy to bar federal funding for groups abroad that give money to other foreign groups that perform abortions.