Mainers rally in Portland on June 24, the two year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which ended the legal right to abortion. (Photo by Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)
Maine’s members of U.S. Congress are pushing to permanently repeal an anti-abortion pact after President Donald Trump reinstated the policy during his first week in office.
The Mexico City Policy, referred to as the global gag rule by critics, prevents nongovernmental organizations that receive federal global health funding from providing access to abortion-related information and care. It has been rescinded and reinstated from administration to administration since first established by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Trump reinstated the rule during his first term, too. Former President Joe Biden rescinded it.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins, independent Sen. Angus King and Democratic U.S. Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden were original cosponsors of a bill reintroduced in Congress this week that aims to halt this pattern by permanently repealing the policy.
“The president believes he has the unilateral right to stop healthcare providers and nonprofit organizations from sharing important, scientifically backed information, despite an overwhelming majority of Americans believing that such rules are wrong,” Pingree wrote in a statement to Maine Morning Star.
While criticizing the move as one that demonstrates a lack of global leadership, Pingree also warned, “it signals exactly how the Trump administration will limit reproductive freedom in this country.”
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Golden spokesperson Mario Moretto said the representative continues to support the permanent repeal of the policy.
“Reproductive health care is health care and Congressman Golden knows health care is best left to patients and their doctors,” Moretto told Maine Morning Star. “The federal government shouldn’t be looking to dictate what those conversations or decisions look like.”
Lisa Margulies, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund, similarly described the rule as an example of politicians inserting themselves between patients and their medical providers.
“Let’s be clear: Politicians are unqualified to make personal, private, complex medical decisions about our health care,” Margulies said. “Everyone, here in the U.S. and around the world, deserves to make their own decisions about their bodies.”
George Hill, president and CEO of Maine Family Planning, which provides affordable reproductive health care services across the state, said the reinstatement of the rule came as no surprise.
“As we’ve seen over the last 30 years, the executive action will destabilize the reproductive health care infrastructure for organizations that serve millions of individuals around the world, jeopardizing essential abortion care and family planning care for people who often live in underserved communities,” Hill said.
On Jan. 24, Trump directed the secretaries of State, Defense, Health and Human Services and the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development to comply with his 2017 memorandum, which expanded the rule as issued by former President George W. Bush in 2001.
Trump’s 2017 expansion meant for the first time that the policy applied not just to global family planning programs but to most global health assistance funded by the U.S. Trump’s Jan. 24 directive also seeks to reinstate other funding restrictions from his last presidency.
In 2021, Biden directed the Secretary of State to resume funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which is the lead U.N. agency on global population and reproductive health, after such funding had been withheld by the first Trump administration under the Kemp-Kasten amendment.
Enacted in 1985, the amendment was a result of the Reagan administration’s concerns about UNFPA activities related to China’s population control policies.
This amendment states that U.S. funds can’t go to “any organization or program which, as determined by the president of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” Evaluations by the U.S. government haven’t found evidence that UNFPA directly engages in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in China.
Invoking the Kemp-Kasten amendment to withhold funding from UNFPA has been a party line move from administration to administration since.
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