President Donald Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy and affirmed the Hyde Amendment, greatly limiting taxpayer dollars from funding abortions at home and abroad, repealing old Biden orders.
(LifeSiteNews) -- President Donald Trump reinstated two key federal rules for keeping taxpayer funding away from the abortion industry Friday, signing two executive orders to reinstate the Mexico City Policy governing foreign aid and directing federal agencies to recognize the Hyde Amendment’s limits on dispensing federal money domestically.
The Mexico City Policy forbids non-governmental organizations from using taxpayer dollars for elective abortions abroad. President Ronald Reagan first instituted the policy in 1984, and President George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001. For decades, it has been taken for granted that Democrat presidents rescind the policy shortly after taking office and Republican presidents restore it. Restoring the policy was one of the first acts of Trump’s first term, and he said on the 2024 campaign trail he would “consider” bringing it back.
Likewise, the Hyde Amendment is traditionally included every year in federal budgets with little objection and has been estimated to have saved more than two million lives since its adoption decades ago by forbidding most taxpayer dollars from directly funding abortions except for cases of rape, incest, or threat to a mother’s life. President Joe Biden proposed removing it in the budgets he submitted to Congress and worked throughout his presidency to distribute funds to entities involved in abortion.
Biden ultimately gave more than $1.23 billion of American taxpayers’ money to pro-abortion groups over the course of his one-term presidency, according to an analysis by Restoration of America, including Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the United Nations Population Fund.
RealClearPolitics reported that, while flying to California aboard Air Force One, Trump signed two executive orders to restore the Mexico City Policy and rescind two Biden orders that launched a “whole-of-government” initiative to protect abortion “access” and defined abortion as “health care,” making abortion centers eligible for certain health aid.
“For nearly five decades, the Congress has annually enacted the Hyde Amendment and similar laws that prevent Federal funding of elective abortion, reflecting a long-standing consensus that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for that practice,” the latter order states. “However, the previous administration disregarded this established, commonsense policy by embedding forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs.”
The latest orders continue a series of positive pro-life actions by the Trump administration throughout his first week back in office, offering some relief to pro-lifers given his 2024 campaign’s move away from the clear pro-life stand of his first term. During remarks to the 2025 March for Life, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance did not signal a return to supporting new federal abortion restrictions but did emphasize Trump’s pardoning of 23 pro-life activists prosecuted by the Biden Department of Justice.
The Trump administration also shut down a “Reproductive Rights” resource page hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services and put a stop to pending FACE Act prosecutions against pro-lifers with stringent new limits on future invocations of the statute.
