Re-electing Trump will mean substantial nationwide restrictions on abortion access
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And many of them won’t require Congress to act:
Anti-abortion groups have not yet persuaded Donald Trump to commit to signing a national ban if he returns to the White House.
In emerging plans that involve everything from the EPA to the Federal Trade Commission to the Postal Service, nearly 100 anti-abortion and conservative groups are mapping out ways the next president can use the sprawling federal bureaucracy to curb abortion access.
But, far from being deterred, those groups are designing a far-reaching anti-abortion agenda for the former president to implement as soon as he is in office.
Many of the policies they advocate are ones Trump implemented in his first term and President Joe Biden rescinded — rules that would have a far greater impact in a post-Roe landscape. Other items on the wish list are new, ranging from efforts to undo state and federal programs promoting access to abortion to a de facto national ban. But all have one thing in common: They don’t require congressional approval.
“The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told POLITICO. “Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”
The groups have had, at times, a fraught relationship with Trump, who appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade but who has blamed the anti-abortion movement for electoral losses, criticized Florida’s six-week ban and favors exemptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. Yet the sweeping plans indicate how much conservative activists see a potential Trump administration as an opportunity to restrict abortion nationwide — including in states that have voted to protect access over the last two years.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project — a coalition that includes Students for Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations — is drafting executive orders to roll back Biden-era policies that have expanded abortion access, such as making abortions available in some circumstances at VA hospitals. They are also collecting resumes from conservative activists interested in becoming political appointees or career civil servants and training them to use overlooked levers of agency power to curb abortion access.
The abortion criminalization movement is also perfectly well aware that Trump will sign any federal abortion ban that Congress puts on his desk, and its more sophisticated members understand that Trump lying or obfuscating his position makes such a ban more likely. The question is whether the media will let him get away with it or do more reporting like this.