The Trump administration is expected to export worldwide its Christian nationalist views on abortion, gender inequity and sexual rights, a reproductive health care expert said during a recent Brookings Institution podcast.
Transforming U.S. foreign policy into an instrument for global culture war is the plan articulated in Project 2025 and briefly implemented during Trump’s first presidency, said Beth Schlachter, senior director of U.S. engagement for MSI Reproductive Services, a nongovernmental organization that provides reproductive services in more than 30 nations.
Beth Schlachter
“When you have an articulated framework like we see under Project 2025 — which for right now is the best indicator we have of where a Trump administration might go with regard to reproductive health policy — what we are looking at is a massive disruption to the services and to the frameworks that work with countries to move us all forward with reproductive health care.”
Schlachter joined a Planned Parenthood executive and two reproductive health legal experts on the panel discussion titled “Reproductive Rights and Justice: The Post-election Landscape.” The webinar was moderated by Brookings Fellow Stephanie Pell.
Stephanie Pell
“The election of Donald Trump further challenges and complicates efforts to protect reproductive rights and provide equitable access to reproductive health care,” Pell said.
Those rights would end with the fulfilment of Project 2025, the conservative outline for overhauling the federal government by reshaping the purpose of every agency along far-right theological lines. The document was created by the Heritage Foundation with contributions from more than 100 former Trump campaign and White House staff members.
Its goals are a threat to millions around the world who depend on U.S. funding for global health, including for HIV/AIDS prevention, reproductive and maternal health care, and sexual and reproductive health care. Partner agencies like the World Health Organization and United Nations Population Fund, among the direct providers of that aid, would also see cuts, Schlachter said.
Project 2025 accuses WHO of “manifest failure and corruption” and goes on to urge the Trump administration to “end blind support for international organizations,” explaining: “If an international organization is effective and advances American interests, the United States should support it. If an international organization is ineffective or does not support American interests, the United States should not support it.”
Project 2025 accuses WHO of “manifest failure and corruption.”
Project 2025 also demands an end to using the U.S. Agency for International Development as “a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism and interventions against perceived systemic racism.”
Furthermore, USAID should be returned to pre-COVID budget levels and restructured to “build on the conservative reforms instituted by the Trump administration,” the plan says.
Schlachter noted Trump aimed to institute similar policies in 2019 with the creation of the “Commission on Unalienable Rights,” a panel designed to advise the U.S. secretary of state on matters of foreign policy through a biblical lens.
“What this commission determined, and what was adopted as Trump administration official policy, was that ‘God’s law,’ or what they call natural law, supersedes human rights law and should be the guiding framework for all U.S. foreign assistance or foreign affairs policy,” she said.
In 2020, Trump unveiled the “Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family,” a compact declaring there is no international right to abortion. More than 30 nations, many of them with authoritarian governments, signed onto the document later spiked by the Biden administration.
“This is a framework that sits outside the multilateral system, and it articulated a one-page worldview, which was a heteronormative framework that family only exists between one man and one woman and their offspring, and that there is no right to abortion, and in fact, abortion should not exist,” Schlachter explained.
Greer Donley
Trump’s election also has domestic reproductive health providers and legal groups anticipating threats to abortion availability already diminished since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, said Greer Donley, associate dean for research and faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and a national expert on abortion law.
Among the likely targets are shield laws enabling providers in abortion-legal states to offer telehealth care to medication abortion patients in states with bans or severe restrictions.
Restrictions could be imposed on telehealth treatment for reproductive health, she added. “The Trump administration could try to reimpose the in-person dispensing requirements at the federal level, essentially banning telehealth for abortion. That would be very devastating for all virtual telehealth providers.”
Another approach may include using the 1873 Comstock Act to ban mailing medication abortion drugs.
Alison Kiser
With outright bans and severe restrictions in two dozen states, organizations that help women travel for abortion care already are overwhelmed in states where the procedure is available, said Alison Kiser, executive director at Planned Parenthood Votes South Atlantic.
“We have to acknowledge the reality that it’s never going to fully be enough to meet the need for all these states, all these patients who need care,” she said. “And the fact is that some people will find their way to care and access states, others will be forced to seek care outside the formal health care system or forced to remain pregnant against their will.”
Whatever the Trump administration brings, Planned Parenthood and its partners will continue its policy of “defiance through compliance,” Kiser added. “We are going to comply with the law so we can continue to provide care to all those who need it. We are committed to figuring out how to navigate these cruel bans that are being put in place in addition to the other restrictions that are clearly designed to shame patients and to make it harder to access care.”
Caroline Sacerdote
But there have been some wins for abortion rights on the state level, said Caroline Sacerdote, senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
In Kansas, abortion restrictions were struck down earlier this year in cases that determined the state’s constitution protects women’s right to the procedure.
And on election day, voters in five states approved constitutional amendments enshrining abortion rights in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Nevada. Similar initiatives were defeated in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.
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