President Joe Biden will move quickly on this
Much of how women’s rights, particularly regarding abortion, have come under assault in the past nearly four years, has had to do with draconian state laws getting upheld by courts. But Donald Trump has also taken steps to roll back decades of women’s progress through executive orders and administrative rulemaking. Once Joe Biden takes his seat at the Resolute desk, you can bet he’ll waste no time working to clean up Trump’s misogynistic stains through some executive action of his own.
Biden has already indicated that he will reverse the “Mexico City Policy,” which is a ban on global health aid for foreign organizations that provide or promote abortions that every Republican President has instituted since Ronald Reagan first announced it in that city. Biden will also bring back Trump-rescinded guidance barring states from defunding Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs.
Additional Trump executive actions are likely to find themselves on the chopping block in early 2021. One example is a May 2019 rule allowing healthcare workers to refuse to provide abortions and other medical services based on moral or religious exemptions. The rule also protects such workers if they refuse to refer patients to other physicians who perform abortions.
Another example is a March 2019 rule that bars Title X providers such as Planned Parenthood from promoting or performing abortions to low-income program recipients, which disproportionately affects minorities. In just the first five months under this “domestic gag order rule,” 844,803 fewer people received care from Title X providers than in 2018, according to a fact sheet by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.
Once the proud, self-proclaimed pussy-grabber leaves the White House and the whole place gets fumigated, President Joe Biden will move quickly to restore dignity. We are now just a couple of months away from meaningful change for women, which will begin the moment Kamala Harris makes history as she gets sworn in as the first female Vice President of the United States. On January 20, 2021, progress will make its triumphant return to America.
Ron Leshnower is a lawyer and the author of several books, including President Trump’s Month