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Like every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, Trump
reinstated the largely popular Mexico City policy, which denies U.S. aid money to any international group that funds or promotes abortion. But he took the policy a step further,
expanding it to cover nearly all U.S. foreign health spending, not just family-planning funds. The administration also moved to defund the United Nations Population Fund on similar grounds.
The Trump administration drastically
expanded the religious and conscience exemption to the Health and Human Services Department’s contraception mandate, which had been added to the Affordable Care Act to require that employers provide employees with subsidized birth control. This exemption enabled religious employers, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor — an order of charitable Catholic nuns — to avoid paying for abortifacient drugs, among other contraceptives.
In rhetoric, too, the White House has been outspokenly pro-life. Vice President Mike Pence
addressed the 2017 March for Life, making him the highest-ranking presidential-administration official ever to speak at the event. The president voiced his willingness to help in the case of Charlie Gard, the terminally ill infant in the U.K. whose parents wished to obtain further care for him in the U.S. rather than take him off of life support at the command of his doctors.
And Trump expressed a willingness to sign the
Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act if it were passed by Congress. The bill would ban abortions nationwide after 20-weeks’ gestation based on research showing unborn children have the capacity to feel pain at that age. The bill passed the House in the fall but stalled in the Senate.
Appointed pro-life Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Actions speak louder than words. Especially words like “I wouldn’t want my daughter to be punished” by a pregnancy.