Latest pro-life orders cover new ground

With his reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy this week, President Donald Trump cut off a resource that has fueled the proliferation of abortion around the globe.

Trump’s executive order, aimed at groups that provide or promote abortions overseas, went further than previous presidents’, extending the rule not just to money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), but “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies.”

Trump adjusted the Mexico City Policy in keeping with the changing landscape of international health assistance. Today, abortion is performed and advocated more widely than in either the Reagan or Bush administrations, according to the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam). President Ronald Reagan first instituted the policy in 1984 at a United Nations meeting in Mexico City.

“Whereas once upon a time the kind of groups that would be promoting abortion would be family planning groups,” C-Fam’s director of legal studies, Stefano Gennarini, told me, “nowadays, they’re getting sexual and reproductive health as a component of every kind of assistance, whether it’s humanitarian assistance, whether it’s population assistance, whether it’s maternal health, whether it’s HIV. All kinds of different aid contexts involve a global health component and, specifically, a reproductive health component.”

Direct funding of overseas abortion has been illegal since the 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, but the Mexico City Policy forbids funding to groups that provide or promote abortions even when the dollars aren’t explicitly spent on abortion itself. The policy grants exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life.

Two years after former President George W. Bush restored the policy, which was abolished in the Clinton years, he broadened it to apply to “all assistance for voluntary population planning … whether such assistance is furnished by USAID or any other bureau, office, or component of the Department of State.”

Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) view abortion as an essential component of women’s healthcare and are choosing to forego federal funding rather than cease performing or promoting abortions.

The same day Trump issued his memorandum, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) announced it would not sign an agreement to cease providing or promoting abortion: “As an organization that seeks to protect and improve the lives of women, men, and children around the world, IPPF and its partners in 170 countries will not sign a policy that denies human rights and puts the lives of women at risk.”

IPPF stands to lose $100 million from USAID.

A second large international group, Marie Stopes International, said in a statement that it sees abortion as “a vital component” of women’s healthcare: “We fundamentally cannot and will not agree to the Mexico City Policy because it violates our core belief in individual choice.”

Opponents of the Mexico City Policy often cite a 2011 World Health Organization (WHO) study that correlates a rise in abortions in sub-Saharan Africa to the policy’s reinstatement during the Bush administration.

The WHO study’s authors wrote that while the rise in abortions correlated with the cessation of U.S. funding to IPPF and Marie Stopes, they admitted they were “unable to draw definitive conclusions” that the policy was the cause.

Since organizations must either sign an agreement to cease activity related to abortion—including lobbying for abortion legalization in their country—or forego U.S. funding, Gennarini said the Mexico City Policy is “self-enforcing” and won’t be an administrative burden.

He said the United States is “the single biggest funder of population groups” that advocate abortion, and those advocacy groups will be the hardest hit.

“That was the original intent of the policy in the first place, to prevent abortion advocacy,” he said. “U.S. taxpayers are very happy to write in assistance to mothers and children, but we’re not happy providing money to groups who go and lobby for abortion rights around the world.”