Trump’s win spells disaster for abortion rights

Trump is heading back to the White House and the consequences for reproductive health in both the USA and globally are catastrophic.

When Trump first came to power in 2016, it provided Christian nationalists with what the author Anne Appelbaum described as their “biblical moment”. This was their unique opportunity to push forward their project and to fulfil their desired policies – to ban abortion, to roll back LGBTIQ rights, and to protect whiteness in America.

Following the lead of men like Leonard Leo, who ran initiatives to train anti-abortion lawyers, Trump promoted numerous conservative judges to the nation’s courts. This culminated in a Supreme Court that was primed to overrule the historic Roe vs Wade decision, which in 1973 allowed for the nationwide right to abortion for all women and girls.

The Dobbs decision, which was announced in June 2022, stripped millions of US women and girls of their basic human right to bodily autonomy. Within days, abortion bans were in place, and as of 7 October 2024, 13 states have a total or near-total ban on abortion, four have bans after six weeks of pregnancy, and another four have gestational limits.

The horrific consequences of Dobbs were immediate. Women have died after being refused abortion care. They have died of sepsis on hospital beds, with doctors unable to treat them due to ambiguity in the laws. They have died of suicide, because being diagnosed as suicidal is not included as an exemption to allow an abortion and save a woman’s life. Some names have been reported in the press, most notably in ProPublica. But, according to the journalist Jessica Valenti, there are many more – women who died unnecessarily because they needed life-saving abortions, and were told they could not have them.

Girls carrying their rapist’s foetus have been forced to give birth. A ten-year-old child was flown out of Ohio to have an abortion days after Dobbs, and when the news came to light, Republicans said it was “fake”. Pregnant children are being hauled in front of judges who tell them they are too immature to have an abortion, because of low grades or not having a driving licence – but are mature enough to have and raise a child.

The disturbing and painful list goes on and on. And now, it’s set to get worse.

What next for the US?

There are big questions about the failures of Biden’s presidency to intervene and take action on abortion. Internationally, I’ll come to those in a moment. But while we can condemn those failings, we have to deal with what is likely to come next, with Trump back in power.

There is very little doubt that Trump will sign a national abortion ban. This is controversial to say, because Republicans have been out on the news – unchallenged – claiming there will be no nationwide ban on abortion. They’re lying: they have simply replaced the word “ban” with “national minimum standard” or “national consensus.”

Take this quote from Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America’s Marjorie Dannenfelser, who told the New York Times “we will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard.” Dannenfelser later met with Trump, calling him “terrific.”

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator, similarly said he’d introduce legislation that would create a “national minimum standard of 15 weeks.” This is a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, nationwide. While it may include exemptions around rape and threat to mother’s life, we know from the last two years, with multiple rape victims giving birth and multiple women dying, that exemptions don’t work.

Next, Trump will come after medical abortion. Already, there have been court challenges trying to remove FDA approval for abortion pills, despite all the evidence that medical abortion is safe – far, far safer than pregnancy, particularly an unwanted one. In states with abortion bans, pills are a lifeline: they are the reason women are not dying from backstreet abortions like they did before legalisation.

After coming for abortion pills, the Christian nationalist right, buoyed by a Trump win, will come after birth control. For years now, anti-abortion activists and influencers have been pushing disinformation that IUDs and emergency contraception – the morning after pill – are a form of abortion. The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case means that employers can deny workers health coverage for hormonal contraception, normalising a belief that preventing pregnancy and ending pregnancy are the same act.

What happens when women cannot access contraception? More women and girls have unwanted pregnancies, which they are forced to carry to term because abortion is banned. When they tried this in Romania, where contraception and abortion was banned for two decades, at least 10,000 women died.

Related story: ID 47412

Global gags

That’s the local impact on abortion of Trump’s win. But what happens in the US does not stay in its borders.

Trump will repeat his action – and the action of every Republican president since Reagan – of implementing the global gag rule. This executive order prohibits foreign nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in receipt of US global health assistance from providing legal abortion services or referrals, while also barring advocacy for abortion law reform. This is even the case if it’s done with the NGO’s own, non-US funds.

The impact of the 2016 gag rule, according to analysis by MSI Reproductive Choices, was an additional 20,000 maternal deaths and 1.8m unsafe abortions.

The global impact of US health policy includes the Helms Amendment, which denies US international aid for abortion in use of ‘family planning’. In practice, the Helms Amendment has been used to prohibit the use of federal funding for all abortions even in the circumstances of rape, incest, or risk to the life.

The Democrats could have done something about this. After Dobbs, they could have clarified Helms’ wording to make it clear that federal funds could go to abortions in these circumstances. In fact, as news came out of Ukraine that women were pregnant as a result of rape as a weapon of war, politicians urged Congress to take action so that more could be done to provide vulnerable women with abortion access. They were not even asking for Helms to be repealed, just clarified. That Biden failed to do so is shameful.

As well as the direct funding impacts, a Trump win is going to embolden the global anti-abortion movement, while US Christian nationalists continue to spread anti-abortion disinformation and try to influence policy-making across Europe and the global south – see former Trump official Valerie Huber in Uganda. Already since Dobbs, the legal arguments made in the US Supreme Court have been used in cases in Kenya, Nigeria and elsewhere.

Room for hope?

Despite everything, abortion bans are not popular in the US. We know this because when abortion is the only thing on the ballot, the pro-choice vote tends to win.

Other elections took place in the US last night – votes on states’ abortion bans. At the time of writing, CNN projected that measures to protect abortion access in Arizona, Colorado, New York and Maryland will pass, while voters in New York, Colorado and Maryland, where abortion is currently legal at least up to the point of viability, voters are going to the polls and saying yes to maintaining current abortion access.

In Missouri, the first state to ban abortion after Dobbs, voters came out to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. This is significant.

Not all votes succeeded. In Florida, the pro-choice vote fell short of the 60% needed to challenge its bans on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

It’s not enough. What’s concerning is that, as mentioned above, future bans will come in – but shrouded in language around “consensus” and “reasonable limits.” Further, the Trump project is a fascist project which is determined to remove women from public space and place them firmly back in the domestic sphere – reasserting the fascistic “natural order” of female subordination to patriarchal authority.

It’s important we name what is happening in the USA. Abortion bans strip women and girls of our human rights. They designate women as less than human, and normalise women’s inequality to men. They trap women in domestic abuse, and deny women access to healthcare, education, work, and economic security.

But we have to find hope. And in hope, we have to find the strength and determination to resist.

openDemocracy's Tracking the Backlash project will continue to investigate and track the global threats to abortion, LGBTQ+ and trans rights.