Trump Admin Plans to Use U.S. Aid as a Bargaining Chip in its Anti-Abortion Agenda

Since returning to office, Trump has used dirty—forsooth disgusting—tricks to shove his anti-abortion agenda onto to the rest of the world. In January, he revived the Mexico City policy, imposing a global gag rule and slashing U.S. funding for any reproductive health or family planning organization that so much as whispers the word “abortion.” Shortly after, he halted funding for PEPFAR, a global health program which was launched by George W. Bush in 2003 to distribute HIV/AIDS medications to poorer countries, amid GOP concerns that the money was now being funneled into abortions abroad. And now, per a report by the Intercept, the administration plans to use foreign aid as a bargaining chip for its anti-abortion animus.

A new aid agreement template will reportedly require foreign countries to share extensive health and pathogen data—as well as abortion data—if they want to receive federal funding. The Intercept reports:

The template agreement, which references the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — but also applies funding to fight malaria, tuberculosis, and other pathogens — would require countries that receive global health assistance to share a broad range of health care and pathogen data for the next 25 years. 

Global health experts who spoke to The Intercept cautioned that these agreements appear to be highly unbalanced, giving the Trump administration sweeping authority to extract data on a number of issues, including on abortion, raising significant concerns about misuse at a time when the Trump administration is looking to limit access to abortion globally. 

“Imposing excessive data demands will only deepen the crisis,” Jessica Stern, the Co-Founder and Principal of The Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice told Jezebel. “It will harm people worldwide and damage U.S. credibility.”

The new document will enforce foreign governments to comply with the Helms Amendment, an archaic policy that blocks U.S. aid from paying for abortion care abroad—and has essentially acted as a total abortion ban at the international aid level, withholding U.S. funds for cases of rape, incest, or life-threatening pregnancies. Technically, Helms doesn’t green-light the U.S. to make a grab at other countries’ abortion data—but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from pretending otherwise.

“Collecting data to improve public health is a credible, long-standing practice—but that’s not what the Trump Administration is doing,” Stern says. “It is undermining access to HIV services, abortion, and other essential reproductive rights, then using those issues as a pretext to deny life-saving foreign assistance.”

“Many countries are feeling so squeezed for funding that they will take the deal,” Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and CEO of Global Health Council, said, nodding to some unease as to what Trump even wants to do with the information. “The part about Helms and requiring compliance information on that for 25 years, along with everything else, does raise some concerns about what [the Trump administration] is doing with this.”

Jezebel has reached out to the State Department, and we’ll let you know if we hear back.

The new move comes a week after the Trump administration revealed it plans to categorize abortion access as a human rights violation—along with DEI policies, transgender care for minors, and viable routes for immigration. And if there’s any one certainty that the president has revealed in the last 11 long months, it’s that the Trump administration can always go lower than low.