USA – Planned Parenthood CEO warns budget bill could devastate group and slash abortion access in blue states

Alexis McGill Johnson says nearly 200 health centers could close if US House passes sweeping tax-and-spending bill

Carter Sherman
Wed 2 Jul 2025

Planned Parenthood stands to lose roughly $700m in federal funding if the US House passes Republicans’ massive spending-and-tax bill, the organization’s CEO said on Wednesday, amounting to what abortion rights supporters and opponents alike have called a “backdoor abortion ban”.

“We are facing down the reality that nearly 200 health centers are at risk of closure. We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, said in an interview Wednesday morning. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/02/planned-parenthood-abortion-ban-trump-bill

02.07.2025

Commentary

Abortion Care Network

Alexis McGill Johnson

funding for abortion

Maine Family Planning

Trump expected to quickly revive ‘global gag rule’ on abortion

by Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech
01/19/25

President-elect Trump is expected to reinstate a controversial policy soon after taking office that would further bar foreign nongovernmental organizations that perform, counsel on or provide information on abortions abroad from receiving U.S. funding.

The Mexico City Policy, referred to as the global gag rule by its opponents, was first introduced during the second Reagan administration and has been rescinded by every Democratic president and reinstated by every Republican president since then. Trump previously restored the policy four days into his first term before President Biden rescinded it again a week into his own.

Continued: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5092735-trump-abortion-mexico-city-policy/

USA – Loans and pawned belongings: abortion patients are increasingly going into debt

Abortion debt is swelling. Providers and groups trying to fill the void created by bans are buckling under the weight

Sarah Leonard
Sun 22 Dec 2024

Early this fall, a woman desperate for an abortion messaged the Wild West Access Fund, an abortion fund in Nevada, asking for support. She guessed she was nearly 20 weeks pregnant and didn’t have even a few hundred dollars to spend on the procedure. She wanted to prove she was doing everything she could to raise the money, and said she was trying to pawn her vehicle.

Over the next few weeks she bounced from clinic to clinic, trying to put the money together as the price of the abortion she sought continued to increase. The cost of a first trimester abortion is about $500, around $2,000 in the second, and a third trimester abortion can range from a few thousand dollars to around $25,000. Since the US supreme court eliminated federal protections for abortion, more than a dozen states banned the procedure completely, while others set gestational limits, increasing travel costs for pregnant people in those states.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/22/abortion-patient-debt

Trump’s Second Term Blueprint: Using the Helms Amendment to Enforce Total Global Abortion Bans

As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to the Helms Amendment—a decades-old policy that keeps women abroad from accessing safe abortion—as a tool.

12/16/2024
by Rachel Marchand

We’re at an inflection point in the long, harmful history of the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act. Enacted 51 years ago this month in the wake of Roe v. Wade, the amendment stipulates “no foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” The State Department, USAID and other federal agencies have often broadly interpreted the Helms Amendment as a total ban on U.S. funding for abortion care—even in cases of rape, incest or a life-threatening pregnancy.

As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to Helms as a tool. It calls for using the amendment to enforce a complete ban on using any U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions abroad, period, no matter the circumstances.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/12/16/trump-project-2025-helms-amendment-abortion-bans-usa-foreign-assistance-aid/

PEPFAR Reauthorization: The Debate About Abortion

Kellie Moss and Jennifer Kates
Sep 21, 2023

Despite a long history of broad and bipartisan support, reauthorization of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is currently being held up by congressional debate around abortion. PEPFAR, first created in 2003 by President George W. Bush and reauthorized three times thus far, is the U.S. government’s signature global health effort in the fight against HIV. Widely regarded as one of the most successful programs in global health history, PEPFAR reports having saved 25 million lives due to its efforts, and KFF analyses have found a significant impact of the program beyond HIV, including large reductions in both maternal and child mortality and significant increases in some childhood immunization rates. Still, its fourth reauthorization has been drawn into broader U.S. political debate about abortion, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision (which overturned the nationwide right to obtain an abortion), even though U.S. law prohibits the use of U.S. foreign assistance, including PEPFAR funding, for abortion. This policy watch provides an overview of the current debate and issues.

Continued: https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/pepfar-reauthorization-the-debate-about-abortion/

Some states are restricting abortion. Others are spending millions to fund it

June 20, 2023
Sarah McCammon

As a growing number of states restrict abortion, other states and some local municipalities are substantially increasing funding for abortion and other reproductive health services.

At least 15 municipal and six state governments allocated nearly $208 million to pay for contraception, abortion and support services for people seeking abortions in the year since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to data provided to NPR by the National Institute for Reproductive Health.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/20/1182722556/abortion-funding-states-dobbs-supreme-court-restrictions-ban

20.06.2023

News

Andrea Miller

funding for abortion

Michelle Lujan Grisham

National Institute for Reproductive Health

National Network of Abortion Funds

U.S. Military to Cover Travel Costs and Offer Leave for Troops Seeking Abortions, Fertility Treatment

16 Feb 2023
Military.com | By Patricia Kime

Service women will soon be able to have their travel expenses paid and receive up to three weeks of leave to obtain an abortion out of state or receive fertility treatments; they also will have up to 20 weeks to notify their commands that they are pregnant, according to three new Defense Department policies.

The department released policies Thursday designed to improve troops' access to reproductive health care and abortion services, clarifying a memo published in October by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directing the service branches to ensure that their members could access abortions and reproductive health care that isn't covered by military health.

Continued: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/02/16/military-cover-travel-costs-and-offer-leave-troops-seeking-abortions-fertility-treatment.html

16.02.2023

U.S. military and abortion

United States

Human Rights

Mackenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, donates $275 million to abortion rights organization

The billionaire philanthropist has given a record amount to Planned Parenthood, a US healthcare group that provides services including termination of pregnancies

Helena Poncini
MAR 29, 2022

Mackenzie Scott continues on her mission to donate most of her money in her lifetime. And as one of the richest women in the world, it’s a hefty amount. The philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth of over $50 billion (around €45 billion), according to Forbes magazine, and in June she announced that she had donated $2.74 billion (around €2.5 billion) to 300 different nonprofit organizations. Now, she has donated $275 million to Planned Parenthood, according to the news agency Reuters. The donation is the largest that the American institution for family planning and women’s health has ever received from a single person.

Continued: https://english.elpais.com/society/2022-03-29/mackenzie-scott-jeff-bezoss-ex-wife-donates-275-million-to-abortion-rights-organization.html

29.03.2022

Fondo Semillas

funding for abortion

Giving Pledge initiative

Jeff Bezos

Mackenzie Scott

Planned Parenthood

USA – While red states restrict abortion, blue states are voting to protect access

March 28, 2022
JACLYN DIAZ

As the country awaits the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrat-led states are proposing laws to shore up abortion rights at the local level.

The effort is in direct response to the organized campaign to make abortion illegal. Dozens of states have enacted laws, or are considering them, to restrict access to abortion as the country awaits the Supreme Court's decision.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1088238619/legislation-abortion-bans

How Some Texans Are Getting Abortions Despite a Devastating Law

March 24, 2022
By Samuel Dickman and Kari White

In September, when the Texas law that outlaws abortions after cardiac activity is detected went into effect, experts predicted that nearly 85 percent of people seeking abortions would be too far along in their pregnancies to qualify for care. As predicted, many thousands of Texans have been denied care under Senate Bill 8, as the state’s anti-abortion measure is known. It continues to cause emotional and financial devastation for Texans who have been forced to seek care in other states. In the first four months it was in effect, nearly 5,600 Texans traveled out of state to get abortion care.

But recent data shows that the decline in the number of abortions in Texas was less than expected, dropping by about half compared to the same months in 2020.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/opinion/texas-abortion-funds-sb8.html