Biden must take action and permanently end the Global Gag Rule to ensure no president reenacts it

The memorandum also directed HHS to ensure that undue restrictions are not put on women’s access to medical information or on the use of federal funds. According to the announcement, HHS will now conduct a review and create a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that is expected to be published in the Federal Register no later than April 15, 2021.

While the administration cannot rewrite the Title X rule by executive order, it can rewrite the Mexico City Policy. First enacted by Ronald Reagan in 1984, the Mexico City Policy has been edited, repealed, and reinstated in subsequent decades. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he brought the Global Gag Rule back as one of his many attempts to restrict abortion access and birth control across the U.S. However, Trump’s edit of the rule impacted not only the U.S., but foreign countries as well. He added further restrictions to include governmental organizations which were previously exempt from the policy.

The policy is a provision under the Title X Family Planning Program, a federal grant program created in 1970 to provide family planning services and preventative health to those in need. Services under the program included not only abortion access but contraception counseling, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections.

According to the Family Planning Annual Report 2016 National Summary, “Title X providers serve a vulnerable population, most of whom are female, low income, and young. In 2016, Title X-funded providers served more than 4.0 million family planning users (i.e., clients) through almost 6.7 million family planning encounters.” More than 3,000 clinical sites including public health departments and nonprofits were dependent on this program to serve people and families prior to the Trump administration.
 

Under the Trump administration, healthcare providers with Title X funding were prohibited from referring patients for abortion care under the Global Gag Rule. Additionally, the policy blocked Planned Parenthood health centers from receiving funding through Title X. Despite the rule being denounced by multiple medical associations and the public, it was upheld. Trump’s administration even cut international aid to the United Nations Population Fund, the lead provider of family-planning services, in 2017 despite there being no evidence that the agency ever engaged in performing excessive abortions. The administration threatened to not only close but stop funding any healthcare facility on the basis that abortions were made accessible or even recommended there.

“Across the country and around the world, people—particularly women, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes—have been denied access to reproductive health care,” a statement from the White House read when Biden took office. The Biden-Harris administration will “protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care” domestically and globally by immediately rescinding the gag rule, according to the memo, which also covers actions to strengthen and expand the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.

According to the Guttmacher Institute in 2016, every $10 million the U.S. cut in aid to international organizations meant about 440,000 fewer people would receive contraception.

“The past four years of Trump’s Global Gag Rule have been detrimental to reproductive health services and rights globally,” Melvine Ouyo, a former clinic director for Family Health Options Kenya, the country’s largest health care provider, said in a statement for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “The policy’s impacts not only have been devastating to marginalized communities, but also to health care providers, organizations and their partnerships, leading to clinic closures, staff layoffs, family planning program cuts, and generally disrupting the public health system.”

While the announcement to rescind the Global Gag Rule has been praised by organizations and advocates globally, more can and must be done. For years the Global Gag Rule has been renounced and then reinforced. Passing an act like the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act (Global HER Act) would not only make the reversal of the Global Gag Rule permanent but allow for better access to reproductive health by expanding abortion access. “We must pass the #GlobalHERAct to ensure that access to critical sexual and reproductive health services in other countries is not dictated by a US president. #EndGlobalGag,”  Guttmacher Institute tweeted.