Earlier this month, President Donald Trump made a suggestion that landed on a key part of his far-right coalition like a sucker punch. Referring to negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, he urged House Republicans to be “a little bit flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which for 50 years has banned the use of federal funds for abortion.
Republicans had allowed ACA subsidies to expire in December, causing insurance premiums to skyrocket for millions of Americans just in time for an election-year backlash. Now, Trump was pushing them to cut a deal with Democrats to resurrect the subsidies, even if it meant compromising on a bedrock conservative principle: no taxpayer support for abortion.
“You gotta work something,” Trump told GOP lawmakers from a stage at the Kennedy Center, where they were gathered for a policy retreat. “You gotta use ingenuity.”
Anti-abortion leaders were apoplectic at Trump’s remarks, warning that backtracking on Hyde would be “a massive betrayal” and threatening to withhold their support in the midterm elections. “If you demoralize a small percentage of pro-lifers,” one leading anti-abortion strategist told Politico, “even if it is only 2 percent of the total electorate in swing districts, that is devastation.”
It wasn’t the first time in the past year abortion opponents have felt taken for granted by the president. “I don’t think Trump believes that he’s beholden to anti-abortion voters in any kind of meaningful way,” legal historian Mary Ziegler says. “He thinks those people will vote for him independently of what he does on abortion.”
Overall, Trump’s first year back in the White House was an unmitigated disaster for American women and trans people, a relentless series of attacks on the social safety net, the healthcare infrastructure, and 60 years of progress on civil rights. But on abortion, his approach has been more slow-walk than shock-and-awe.
Abortion opponents have managed to score a few meaningful victories—including the reinstatement of the global gag rule banning US aid to international groups supporting abortion; a total ban on abortion services for veterans and their dependents; and an end to enforcement of the federal law requiring hospitals to offer abortion care in medical emergencies. Planned Parenthood was kicked off Medicaid—for a year.
But other policies envisioned by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term, haven’t come to pass—yet. Trump officials have not rescinded Food and Drug Administration rules that make abortion pills widely accessible across the US. (A new FDA study into the safety of the mifepristone is widely seen as a delaying tactic to avoid more sweeping action.) Nor has the administration resuscitated the Comstock Act, the Victorian-era “zombie” law that prohibits the mailing (or Fed-Exing, or UPS-ing, or DHL-ing) of drugs, supplies, and equipment that could be used for abortion.
Undeterred, abortion opponents have continued to press ahead in federal and state courts, hoping conservative judges will force policy changes that the Trump administration won’t undertake on its own. “I think that, left to his own devices, Trump might just run out the clock on abortion stuff for the entirety of his presidency,” Ziegler says. “But he’s not going to be left to his own devices.”
To help understand how Trump’s first year has confounded expectations among abortion opponents and supporters alike, I reached out to Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and frequent chronicler of the abortion wars, whose next book—her eighth—focuses on the conservative Christian legal movement. She spoke with me by phone last week from her home office outside San Francisco. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You don’t seem very surprised by how little the Trump administration has done to restrict abortion at the federal level. Why?
There was a lot of ambiguity about what Trump was going to do. He doesn’t seem to have a strong personal opinion either way on abortion, the way he does on, say, Greenland or Venezuela. And the fact that he doesn’t care that much led some people to believe that maybe he could be swayed by people who do care, like congressional Republicans, or anti-abortion groups, or his own voters.
“A year into his term, it’s clear that Trump does have a stronger opinion on abortion than a lot of people thought—he thinks it’s bad politics.”
But Trump has blamed his political setbacks, like Republicans’ poor showing in the 2022 midterms and the defeat of some of his hand-picked candidates, not on himself or his unpopularity, but on abortion. A year into his term, it’s clear that Trump does have a stronger opinion on abortion than a lot of people thought—he thinks it’s bad politics. Abortion is one of the few areas where he is operating like an ordinary politician, where he seems to be primarily focusing on what would be advantageous or disadvantageous for him in terms of his popularity. And that has pointed him and his administration in the direction of doing nothing.
How does what we are seeing now compare to how he campaigned on this issue?
In a deep sense, this is what he was doing on the campaign trail—not committing to anything on abortion. Officially saying abortion should be a states’ rights issue, while simultaneously winking and nodding at anti-abortion people in ways that made them think he was going to do what they wanted once he was back in the White House. His messaging on abortion to conservatives is, “I’m thinking about it.” And, “Maybe I’ll do something on it later.” He’ll roll out [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] or somebody else to say things that sound like the administration is going to do something about mifepristone— they’re studying it or whatever—and then they don’t do anything.
He may do something after the 2026 midterms, when he is more of a lame duck. Maybe then he gives anti-abortion voters a bone, because there’s no downside for him. But his lack of action on abortion so far has at least partly diffused what had been a really dangerous issue for Republicans, and he hasn’t had any reason to change course on that.
In contrast to his actions on abortion, Trump has been extraordinarily aggressive in attacking trans rights. Does that surprise you?
Not really, because for a lot of social conservatives, the trans issue is really, really, really important. It’s part of a whole constellation of issues that these groups call “God’s design for sexuality,” or “God’s design for human flourishing” —everything from abortion and contraception to same-sex marriage, gender roles in the family, and sex discrimination law. As they see it, the definition of sex is a pretty basic part of God’s design.
And unlike abortion, it was clear starting in 2022 that the polling, at least on some trans issues, favored Republicans. Trump had the ad, “She’s for they/them, he’s for you.” So, catering to conservatives on trans issues gives those base voters something they really want without being politically costly in the way that giving them what they want on abortion would be.
What are some of the major ways Trump has disappointed the anti-abortion movement in the past year?
There was disappointment that some very movement-aligned people from the first Trump administration are not in the second Trump administration. People like Roger Severino, who has been very outspoken about the Comstock Act. He’s very powerful in the anti-abortion movement, but also had been in Trump’s orbit, and, as far as anyone knew, hadn’t really had a falling out with him.
Gene Hamilton, [now president of America First Legal, cofounded by Stephen Miller] who wrote the part of Project 2025 that was the most focused on Comstock, seemed like a possibility because he had been involved with various legal things for Trump. Or [Texas-based anti-abortion legal strategist] Jonathan Mitchell, who represented Trump before the Supreme Court in the case over whether Colorado could disqualify him from the 2024 primary ballot. People weren’t necessarily expecting all of them to be in the new administration, but the fact that none of them are was a disappointment.
And there was real shock and rage at the FDA decision to approve the generic mifepristone in October. That took a lot of people entirely by surprise.
Why on earth did the Trump FDA approve another generic version of mifepristone?
In some ways, it wasn’t remarkable. Federal law is pretty clear that if there is a chemically identical generic drug prescribed for the same use at the same strength and dosage that petitions for approval, the FDA has to approve the drug. That was true here with brand-name and generic mifepristone. That was the administration’s explanation—”We’re just following federal law.” Of course, the administration has felt pretty comfortable not following federal law on lots of things when it doesn’t want to. The anti-abortion movement was looking at mifepristone and saying, “Why is this the one circumstance in which you feel your hands are tied by federal law?”
The FDA falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, which is headed, of course, by RFK Jr. What do you make of his role at HHS and his impact on reproductive health issues?
RFK Jr. is a complicated figure as far as these issues are concerned. I think he’s at HHS in part because he, like Trump, is not particularly committed on the issue of abortion. I think he’s happy to go with whatever Trump tells him to do. The same is true of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. I don’t think either of them is lobbying Trump to move in the direction of more restrictions. And there’s been reporting that Makary actively opposes any big moves on mifepristone until at least after the midterms.
“If the Trump administration feels compelled to do something on abortion, MAHA-aligned health arguments . . . may offer a way for them to justify whatever they eventually do.”
But having said that, the whole Make America Healthy Again movement is supplying a lot of resources for the anti-abortion movement. A lot of work is being done by abortion opponents to suggest that IVF, contraception, and abortion pills are unsafe for the people who use them, and that they are polluting the environment. I doubt if any of that will move RFK unless Trump gives him the green light. But I do think the MAHA-aligned arguments have led to new ways to talk about opposition to abortion that resonate with some conservatives. And if the Trump administration feels compelled to do something on abortion, the health arguments may offer a way for them to justify it.
RFK Jr. has also been very vocal about promoting online theories blaming health issues on whatever people do during pregnancy—like, your child has autism because you took antidepressants or Tylenol or had a vaccine when you shouldn’t have.
This feeds right into the parts of the anti-abortion movement that want to punish women for their behavior during pregnancy and the self-proclaimed abortion abolitionists who want to prosecute abortion seekers.
The anti-abortion movement hasn’t been content to just sit and wait for the Trump administration to act. They’re passing stricter laws at the state level and filing lawsuits to cut off access to the abortion pill and force Trump’s hand. How scary are these cases?
“We’re now at a point where there are a bunch of loaded guns lying around on tables, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. This is sort of like a Russian roulette moment.”
We’re now at a point where there are a bunch of loaded guns lying around on tables, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. This is sort of like a Russian roulette moment. We have a bunch of cases about mifepristone, about the Comstock Act, about shield laws, some of them before judges we expect to be very sympathetic to abortion opponents, and we just don’t know what’s going to happen to any of them.
Which of these “loaded guns” are you paying attention to most closely?
Very recently, the states of Texas and Florida filed a lawsuit against the FDA over its approval of mifepristone. They filed it in a federal court in Texas, where Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee and very aligned with the anti-abortion movement, is the only judge. It’s very similar to the case filed in 2022 by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—also in front of Kacsmaryk—that ended up at the Supreme Court. The case had procedural flaws, and SCOTUS ultimately ruled that the plaintiffs, who were a group of anti-abortion doctors, didn’t have standing to sue. But the court’s decision was on a technicality. The justices decided nothing on the merits.
With this new case, Texas might have a stronger standing argument. We already know what Kacsmaryk thinks about the Comstock Act and the FDA. It seems very likely he would send another case back up to the Supreme Court.
What about cases that start in the states but could have federal implications?
The attorney general of Florida is trying to use consumer fraud law to go after Planned Parenthood. The argument is that Planned Parenthood deceives and misleads consumers by asserting on its website that mifepristone is safer than Tylenol. They’re suing for $350 million. The Florida Supreme Court, where this would likely end up, is extremely conservative and interested in fetal personhood, among other things. Missouri’s AG has a similar case. There’s a lot of experimenting going on now among anti-abortion groups with how to use the state courts to have a national impact.
Is it my imagination, or does it seem these newer cases, which could be extremely damaging, haven’t provoked the same intense public response as the earlier one?
There’s a fairly significant misunderstanding about what’s been going on. I think people know that abortion opponents lost a mifepristone case in 2024 and that Trump hasn’t done anything yet on abortion. The takeaway for many people is that neither SCOTUS nor Trump will do anything on abortion, which doesn’t follow.
When people think about abortion, they either think about the US Supreme Court or the Trump administration. They don’t think about lower-court litigation, which no one pays attention to until things are headed to SCOTUS. There’s also the issue of timing, because a lot of these new lawsuits were filed in the last year, and it can take a while to get through the courts. So this feeling of “There’s nothing to see here on the abortion side of things” may continue in the short term.
Is this a question of complacency or that, given the incredible chaos in this administration, people are trying to figure out which fire to pay attention to, and abortion doesn’t feel like the biggest fire at the moment.
I think people who don’t follow this closely believe that IVF and abortion access are more protected than they probably are. And that’s resulted in a feedback loop, where polling suggests that the people who care most about these issues are the people who want to criminalize abortion. That might embolden some politicians to actually behave as if that’s true.
We don’t know if that will be true of Trump, but I think other Republicans are acting a lot less worried about [public opinion on] abortion and IVF than they were even a year ago. That makes it more likely that we’ll see more extreme judicial decisions and laws that will be introduced or even enacted.
Do you think conservatives really think people in this country have stopped caring about abortion as much as they did in the 2024 elections?
Some of them do. It’s obviously wishful thinking. The 19th, which is hardly a conservative outlet, is saying that people who are anti-abortion care more about the issue right now than repro-rights supporters do.
To his credit, Trump doesn’t think that. And I think Trump’s instincts on this have been pretty good, just from a political standpoint.
But I think a lot of other Republicans are looking for any sign that allows them to do what they want to do anyway, without big blowback.
Do you anticipate that that Trump administration will take any major actions around reproductive rights before the midterms?
I don’t see Marty Makary at the FDA doing anything on restricting mifepristone until after the elections. I’d be even more surprised if anybody did anything on Comstock, because it’s harder to do anything narrow on Comstock—either you’re doing it, or you’re not. The wild card is if something comes from another part of the government—a judicial decision or something else.
Trump’s preference is to leave so much ambiguity that everybody believes that he agrees with them. The Trump administration has no more committed to leaving mifepristone alone than it has committed to restricting it. It just hasn’t taken a stand. What we don’t know is if some other actor in the government does take a stand, and that requires a response from Trump, what is he actually going to do?
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.