Trump Revokes Biden Orders On Women's Health

President Trump's executive order "Enforcing the Hyde Amendment" does more than assure Federal funds do not pay for abortions; this and the other order signed today assure that women of childbearing age may not have any access to all kinds of healthcare, whether or not it has anything to do with reproductive care.

 

In two orders (here and here) President Trump rescinded three Biden-era orders protecting women's access to reproductive and general healthcare. 

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, several States moved to lock down not only women's access to abortion, but also any clinic, hospital or doctor that provided abortion services, or even mentioned abortion services as an option. Further, States began eyeing general healthcare providers and emergency rooms, leading to doctors fearing prosecution if , in the course of their treatments, there was a threat of pregnancy termination. In some cases, doctors were afraid to provide care as women died from pregnancy complications.

Women not seeking elective abortions, or healthcare that wasn't considered reproductive healthcare at all, have been victims of State laws, and the fears providers have of running afoul of the laws in their States.

Biden's executive orders were aimed at assuring that women received healthcare regardless of State laws. This applied to healthcare providers that were identified as abortion-friendly by anti-choice States. You can read the text of Biden's orders here, here and here. The orders sought to protect doctors in oddball cases where a medication prescribed to a woman for unrelated issues, like ulcers or heart failure, inadvertently caused a pregnancy to terminate. 

These orders are, in large part, symbolic. It's doubtful that President Biden's orders yielded much in the way of real-life help for women trying to get help, so I doubt that Trump's rescinding the orders really did anything in the short term. However, it will help to embolden anti-choice States to prosecute Emergency Room doctors who saved women, or general practitioners who helped reduce a woman's blood pressure, to cite a few examples.