Donald Trump’s Week One actions on abortion appear to be just as brazen and trollish as his attempts on the campaign trail to convince voters he’d moderated on abortion. (And that is not to suggest that things won’t take a yet more sinister — and substantive — turn in the days to come.)
Throughout 2024, Trump insulted voters’ intelligence by publicly waffling when asked about his stances on reproductive rights, making vague remarks about returning the issue to the states and putting out nonsensical statements that did little but muddy the particulars of his platform. The obfuscative approach was somewhat successful insofar as he was able to get reelected during a cycle when Democrats attempted to make abortion a focus of the election. The same former president who was responsible for stacking the court with the Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe was, it seems, hoping to skate through the election without truly making clear whether he was against a federal abortion ban, claiming that he was ardently in favor of exceptions and that he was the “father of IVF” despite surrounding himself with those who embrace fetal personhood ideology. Maybe it worked.
But it was always clear to anyone paying attention that this ephemeral pivot to center — or to somewhere in the fog in the distance — for the general election was all about convincing voters Trump’s abortion position was not as extreme as Democrats are telling you it is. At one point during the vice presidential debate last fall, Vice President JD Vance told voters, feigning humility, that the Republican Party has to do “a better job of winning back people’s trust” on the issue. In the same breath, he denied supporting a federal abortion ban, but said he supported a “minimal national standard.” That’s an abortion ban by another name.
Trump did not mention abortion once in his inaugural address and the issue was noticeably absent from the dozens of executive orders he signed after being sworn in. Some expected anti-abortion measures to be part of his Day One barrage of actions, like reviving the Comstock Act or putting limits on abortion medication prescribed via telehealth.
But the moves he has made, three days into Trump II, have been just as cryptic and ominous as his remarks on the campaign trail — trolly and lacking in substance, though disturbing enough to spark panic.
In addition to shutting down other official White House websites — like the Spanish-language White House platforms and an official White House webpage for the Constitution, as reported out by Gizmodo — the government website ReproductiveRights.gov is now a broken link, reportedly taken offline just hours after Trump assumed office. The Wayback Machine shows the site was active up until Jan. 15.
The website was originally launched in 2022 by the Department of Health and Human Services after Roe was overturned. It served as a sort of PSA for those looking to better understand their rights and/or seek out access to abortion and contraceptives as bans passed in red states around the nation. The site also, crucially, directed users to the AbortionFinder site, which provides information about abortion restrictions filtered by state and information about financial help to get an abortion.
It also appears the HHS website has been scrubbed of any mentions of “abortion” besides those relevant to Trump’s first term, too. Per new reporting from NPR:
On the second day of the second Trump administration, a search for the term “abortion” on the website for the federal Department of Health and Human Services brings up 166 results. The top hit is from January 24, 2020, during President Trump’s first term, and is about how California violated the rights of two religious organizations that wanted to offer health plans that excluded coverage for abortion.
Trying to sort the results to see the most recent items first returns no links at all and the message reads “search unreachable.”
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