On Jan. 24, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “to end the use of federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.” In doing so, Trump rescinded two executive orders made by former President Joe Biden.
Executive Order 14076, titled “Protecting Access to Reproductive Healthcare Services,” directed departments and agencies to take steps to protect reproductive health care and access. Executive Order 14079, titled “Securing Access to Reproductive and Other Healthcare Services”, directed the Department of Health and Human Services to further protect and expand access to reproductive healthcare services.
The president also ended federal funding for abortion overseas by signing a presidential memorandum. According to the White House, the memorandum ensures, “…that no U.S. taxpayer money supports foreign organizations that perform or actively promote abortion in other nations.”
In June 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.
Some students at GSU have negative reactions to the new orders.
“It just feels like America is going downhill,” Brea Bostic, a senior at Georgia State, said. “It’s very overwhelming to understand you don’t have rights over your body. If you do miss that six-week mark, and you travel to other states, they will still find a way to try and prosecute you.”
Regarding Trump’s general presidency, Bostic went on to say that it is “very saddening and heartbreaking to see where the country is going.”
“To see that he is trying to do things that he doesn’t even have the power to do, and it’s taking a lot of time for Congress to put that separation,” she said. “He just keeps doing things just because he feels like he has the power. Some women still have rights as it is, but if they completely ban abortions—that just bans safe abortions.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, in 1984, former President Ronald Reagan issued the Mexico City Policy, which required, “…foreign nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) family planning assistance to certify that they would not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning, even if such activities were conducted with non-U.S. funds.”
This policy was rescinded and reinstated numerous times throughout the decades and was most recently reinstated by Trump on Jan. 24, 2025.
Krisha Patel, a freshman at Georgia State University, said that Trump “does not care about women in the country.”
“A felon should not be allowed to run our country, and a man should not have a say about a woman’s body,” she said. “There are so many circumstances that affect pregnancy. The fact that ReproductiveRights.gov is gone now says a lot about the direction the country is going. It’s sad to see the president, who is supposed to be taking care of the nation and its people, just not caring about women.”
“When all these policies were being enforced, not a single woman was at the meeting. Even some of the women on the Supreme Court are against abortion rights. A woman should have the choice to make her own decisions about her body, whether that is getting an abortion or not.”
