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What will a second Trump presidency mean for women? Advocates are afraid to find out.

by Jodi Enda January 20, 2025

This article was republished from a Fuller Project newsletter on January 20, 2025. Subscribe here.


Eight years ago, on the day after Donald Trump moved into the White House, millions of women and their supporters donned pink “pussy” hats and marched in cities across the country and the world in a show of force that we now know largely failed. That the Women’s March was the largest single-day protest in American history, with half a million people cramming into the streets of downtown Washington and some 3.5 million marching in other cities and towns, mattered not a whit.

Trump made good on his campaign promise to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. He strengthened anti-abortion restrictions on women overseas. He expanded religious and moral exemptions to insurance coverage of contraceptives. He made it more difficult to investigate campus sexual assault allegations. And he revoked a law intended to ensure that companies receiving federal contracts paid women equal to men, among other things.

Today, as Trump takes the oath of office for the second time and settles back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, protests are expected to be smaller. But advocates for women are just as concerned, if not more so, as they were on Inauguration Day 2017. The reasons: They saw what Trump did in his first term and have digested, as much as possible, his purported plans for the second.

One of the first things Trump is expected to do — because he and every Republican president since 1984 has — is invoke what Ronald Reagan dubbed the “Mexico City Policy.” Under his GOP predecessors, the policy prohibited foreign family planning organizations that accept U.S. aid from performing, counseling on or advocating for abortion. Trump renamed the policy Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance and expanded it to apply to all health care assistance.

That change led to about 108,000 maternal and child deaths and 360,000 new HIV infections, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated.

President Joe Biden followed a Democratic tradition of revoking the anti-abortion policy, which opponents call the “global gag rule.” But now, Trump has another chance to reinstate and even toughen it. Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for his administration, proposes expanding the policy to cover all foreign aid, including humanitarian assistance. Further, Trump is likely to once again eliminate financial support for the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s largest provider of donated contraceptives.

Trump and his allies also have signaled plans to curtail abortion across the United States, a task made possible by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe in 2022. Although Trump has said he would not support a national abortion ban — a position that could change if the new Republican-controlled Congress passes such legislation — there are other things his administration could do to greatly reduce access. It could, for instance, reinterpret the Comstock Act of 1873, an anti-obscenity law, to prevent distribution of abortion pills and equipment through the U.S. Postal Service or other carriers, such as UPS or FedEx. 

The administration also could restrict access to mifepristone, which is commonly used in medication abortions; stop enforcing a federal requirement that hospitals provide emergency abortion care; and reinstate what detractors called Trump’s “domestic gag rule.” That rule, reversed by Biden, barred medical providers that performed or offered abortion referrals from receiving money for non-abortion services under Title X, which subsidizes family planning services for people with low incomes. (Federal law has long prohibited using taxpayer money to pay for abortions in almost all cases.)

While limiting abortion and other reproductive rights tops the wish list for many conservative groups, the second Trump administration and Republicans in the House and Senate are expected to take action that could affect women in many other ways. 

Conservatives in Congress are poised to take aim at social safety net programs that help women with low incomes pay for food, housing, transportation and health care. Trump is likely to do away with the White House Gender Policy Council, which Biden created to coordinate federal efforts to advance gender equity and equality, as well as the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. That initiative, launched last March and led by first lady Jill Biden, is an attempt to close a persistent, yawning gap in research on diseases that primarily affect women and in the inclusion of women in clinical trials in general.

During a campaign in which transgender rights became a wedge issue, Trump pledged to bar trans athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports in school. Last week, the House passed a bill, supported by every Republican and two Democrats, that would strip schools of federal education funding if they allow trans women or girls to compete.

Trump also has been a vocal critic of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs, which have helped boost the ranks and treatment of women and people of color in the workforce. Biden advanced DEI in the federal workforce with executive orders that Trump is expected to quickly reverse.

While there are any number of actions Trump can take that will affect the lives of women, the most consequential could be his ability to nominate additional conservative federal judges and, possibly, Supreme Court justices. His first-term nominees already rolled back a constitutional right for the first time in the nation’s history.

How many judicial appointments Trump will be able to make is unpredictable. That they will have long-lasting repercussions is not.