Abortion rights under siege in Trump’s America
Four months after Texas legislators implemented a total abortion ban in 2021, Josseli Barnica presented at a Houston hospital. She was 28 years old and seventeen weeks pregnant with her second child, and she was miscarrying. In any normal circumstance, doctors would have offered to induce delivery or empty her uterus; to do otherwise would mean risking serious infection and possibly sepsis.
But Texas’ anti-abortion laws make it a crime to end the heartbeat of a foetus, no matter how life-threatening the situation is to either mother or child. Doctors at the hospital agreed that they couldn’t intervene until the heartbeat was no longer detectable, so Barnica waited an agonising 40 hours to deliver, each passing hour increasing her risk of developing a deadly infection. Three days later, she died as a result of sepsis due to acute bacterial endometritis.
Barnica’s is just one case among many. Maternal mortality rates are climbing in states with abortion bans. Infant mortality is increasing too. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently found that there’s been an almost 6 percent increase in infant mortality since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. That number jumps to 11 percent for Black babies.
Despite the clear and present danger posed by denying or delaying lifesaving health care to their patients, the tangled web of anti-abortion legislation in red states puts doctors and nurses in a bind.
If doctors in states like Texas decide to break the laws, they risk prosecution, fines and prison sentences of up to 99 years. The rare exceptions to blanket bans, such as in cases when the mother’s life is at risk, are too ill defined to interpret with confidence in the heat of a medical emergency.
“Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion’”, an obstetrician in San Antonio told ProPublica. These laws have made it nearly impossible for healthcare workers to provide patients with the care they want to deliver. In Idaho, another state that restricts all abortion outside of exceptional circumstances, one in four obstetrician-gynaecologists have left the state or retired in the last three years.
These bans affect women who want to carry their pregnancies to term as much as those who want to access abortion. Many of these states have now banned abortion even in cases where the foetus has a life-threatening condition or serious anomaly in utero, forcing women to endure the pain of childbirth in the knowledge that their baby will not survive outside the womb.
In this context, Trump’s re-election is another lurch backwards for reproductive justice. The 2022 Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v Wade has already set US federal abortion rights back by five decades, opening the space for a whole series of states to implement severe restrictions, and Trump’s administration promises to go even further. For anyone concerned about defending abortion and fighting for a world without sexism, this is a disastrous development.
But for the fanatically anti-abortion right, it’s as though Christmas has come early.
First, they were given a clear signal that the incoming administration will not stand in the way of the “pro-life” movement. Trump’s early flurry of executive orders included pardons for a number of activists charged with obstructing access to abortion clinics. The message is clear: the government and justice system will turn a blind eye to organisations and individuals who harass, intimidate or threaten violence against people seeking abortions. Pro-lifers can rest easy knowing they have the support of the president himself.
Next, Trump reinstated the global gag order, a law that prevents US foreign aid being sent to organisations that provide or counsel abortion. This first blow against global reproductive health care has been compounded by the blanket freeze on USAID implemented by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The freeze has already had a catastrophic impact on women’s health care across the world. According to sexual health NGO the Guttmacher Institute, it has so far impacted 3 million women in recipient countries including South Africa, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Palestine, blocking their access to contraceptive care and other vital services through family planning clinics. If the freeze lasts all year, up to 4 million unintended pregnancies may occur and at least 8,000 women will die unnecessarily in childbirth.
Dr Elizabeth Sully, senior research scientist at Guttmacher, described the dire situation now faced by countless women around the world. “You can go to a clinic now that maybe you’d been to before, and that’s where you’d been receiving your injections or your contraceptive pills ... and you show up to that clinic now and its doors are closed, or there’s no commodities in stock, and no one can tell you when to come back.” Not only will this decision force many millions into conceiving and carrying children they do not want, but it will also massively undermine efforts to curb HIV/AIDs and other preventable illnesses.
The total expenditure on USAID in 2023 amounted to $44 billion, providing millions of people with lifesaving health care. Musk’s unilateral decision to freeze funding will cause incalculable harm. And this from a man who has increased his wealth, according to some estimates, by more than $600 billion just since November.
On the home front, Trump and Vance have reaffirmed their commitment to de-funding Planned Parenthood, playing into pro-life hysteria that the organisation is a one-stop abortion shop. During last year’s election campaign, Vance was asked where he expected women to go for reproductive health care if Planned Parenthood clinics across the country were shut down. Vance declined to comment; the Republicans simply don’t care.
In 2025, the pro-life movement is pushing against an open door. The far right is in power and waging a campaign against social progress of all kinds, be it environmental protections, gender diversity, immigration or workers’ rights. The rise of this meaner, nastier, more nakedly pro-capitalist politics has rapidly shifted the parameters of what’s acceptable in mainstream public discourse. And capitalists everywhere are determined to be at the forefront of the new era of reaction.
Take two of Trump’s biggest billionaire backers, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Both men have made overtures towards supporting abortion in the past—in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, Zuckerberg and Bezos both publicly vowed to support financially any workers who had to travel interstate to access abortions. At the time, they clearly felt some pressure to pose as supporters of reproductive justice. But privately, both used their companies to donate large sums of money to anti-abortion Republicans. And now that unashamed misogyny is in the ascendancy, they have dropped any pretence of concern for the rights of women.
Studies show that when women are forced to carry unwanted or unviable pregnancies to term, they become more vulnerable, less likely to finish higher education, less likely to stay in full-time work, more likely to stay with abusive partners and more likely to suffer mental health issues. And at the deadliest end of the spectrum, they are much more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. When abortion is banned, women and babies die. This is the central hypocrisy at the heart of the pro-life movement.
The truth is that anti-abortion politics has never been about protecting life. Abortion is a central cause for the right because it is a way to push back against the gains won by women and other oppressed groups in the 1960s. The idea that people should be allowed to exercise agency over their lives and not conform to a preordained role dictated by the state, church or family, is anathema to the right. Attacks on abortion therefore fit into a broader reactionary world view concerned with forcing ordinary people to bow down and accept their place in society. The right stand for strengthening the power of the nation, the state, the police, borders and every other institution that enables the capitalist class to hold onto their power and profits. This is why right-wingers are rarely single issue; they have a comprehensive vision for society that includes attacking women’s rights, promoting gender norms, jailing and deporting immigrants, crushing unions and slashing regulations that impose on the rights of capitalists to amass yet more wealth.
To turn this situation around, a serious fight needs to be had. Luckily, despite the overall backwardness of US politics, a majority of people continue to support the right to abortion. Recent data from the Pew Research Center puts that number at nearly two-thirds of the population, a figure that has increased since the Dobbs decision. The first flickers of resistance to the Trump administration are growing in protests against ICE raids and deportations; the left needs to build on these examples to broaden the struggle against the resurgent right.
Just as the far right have linked together a broad spectrum of reactionary causes in their fight to shape society in their interests, our side needs to draw the links between every instance of injustice and oppression, pulling these disparate struggles together into a wholesale challenge to the system. Only through turning the rage that millions of us feel into a force that can’t be denied do we stand a chance of turning back the tide of reaction.
The capitalist class are fickle friends to anyone interested in building a society in which women aren’t forced to carry children against their will, in which health care is fully funded and freely available, in which the immense resources at our disposal are used to make the world a better place, rather than an increasingly dystopian hellhole for all but the wealthiest. Their representatives in both the Republican and Democratic parties are more concerned with defending the status quo than fighting for the oppressed.
As long as society is ruled by a clique whose power relies on dividing and disempowering the majority, women’s lives will continue to be subordinated to the interests of social stability and deference to power. Capitalism is the fundamental barrier to a society in which people’s needs and desires come before arbitrary structures of power and privilege; ending its reign of death and destruction has never been a more urgent task.
