Partners In Health (PIH) strongly opposes President Trump’s executive order to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, or “Global Gag Rule” as it became known by critics due to its silencing effect on discussions addressing abortion services as a critical component of reproductive care.
The policy demands that foreign nongovernmental organizations cease using funds from the U.S. government to “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.” Those caught breaking this order will see their funding from the U.S. slashed.
In 2017, President Trump significantly expanded the scope of the Global Gag Rule to apply to all U.S. health aid issued to countries worldwide. During former President Joseph Biden’s first month in office, he rescinded the policy as part of a series of executive orders aimed at increasing access to health care globally. On January 24, the Trump Administration reinstated the expanded policy.
The Global Gag Rule has a dangerous impact on the fundamental rights and health of women, girls, and pregnant people, and it disproportionally affects those who are already systemically marginalized. It also undermines clinicians’ duty to provide comprehensive care to their patients. Since the second Reagan administration first implemented the policy in 1985, when the Global Gag Rule was put in place, women have faced a decrease in contraceptive and outreach services, and there has been instrumental damage to health system integration and referral networks, along with an overall erosion in advocacy for reproductive justice worldwide.
The reinstatement of this harmful policy will continue to have a negative ripple effect across entire health systems, such as:
- Reducing essential training and equipment for clinicians to provide safe abortion care, even when it is needed to save a woman’s life
- Fuelling a reluctance by clinicians to provide critical care following unsafe abortions, which are the third leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide according to the World Health Organization
- Decreasing the provision and use of contraception among women
- Increasing unintended pregnancy, abortion rates, maternal and child mortality rates, and HIV rates
The order to reinstate the Global Gag Rule comes shortly after the U.S. State Department’s recent directive to immediately stop work on the majority of existing foreign aid programs in response to an executive order that paused any new aid for 90 days.
The Trump administration’s stop-work order on all foreign assistance will have a detrimental impact on family planning services. For the last nine years, Congress has consistently designated $607.5 million in foreign aid for family planning annually, providing an estimated 47.6 million women and girls with modern contraceptive care in 2025.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, on average, 130,390 women get contraceptive care each day under U.S.-funded programs. Over the course of the full 90-day freeze on foreign aid, around 11.7 million women and girls will be denied this essential care.
What does this mean for recipients of these services? Based on global trends, if 11.7 million women and girls are denied access to contraceptive care in 2025, 4.2 million will experience unintended pregnancies, and 8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.
Under international law, all people have a human right to make their own choices about whether and when to have children. The Global Gag Rule and stop-work order undermine the collective efforts to protect the sexual and reproductive health and rights of people around the world.
Lifesaving abortion services, and information regarding such services, cannot be separated from a person’s reproductive health needs. PIH believes that to protect the sexual and reproductive health and rights of people around the world, the Global Gag Rule needs to be permanently repealed.
