Trump says he’ll leave abortion to the states. It won’t be so simple

Despite his campaign promises to leave the issue to the states, President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will shape the national landscape around abortion and reproductive health.

Despite his campaign promises to leave the issue to the states, President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will shape the national landscape around abortion and reproductive health. Trump leaned into the abortion issue in the 2016 campaign and made good on his promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which protected the right to an abortion nationwide. However, the court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization prompted a political backlash that Trump has tried to sidestep, while opening new legal quandaries that his second administration will have no choice but to navigate. Chief among them are two cases involving the federal government that have both already been up to the Supreme Court once and could well land before the justices again during Trump’s second term. One of them is a challenge to federal regulations that have made abortion pills easier to obtain. The second deals with whether an emergency room patient is entitled to an abortion — even in states that ban the procedure — if a pregnancy complication is putting her health in danger. Trump will also face calls from anti-abortion activists to reverse Biden-era policies that shored up abortion access after the Dobbs decision and to perhaps go further to undermine the efforts by blue states to respond to Roe’s reversal. And his administration may also be forced to choose whether to pursue other changes, such as how the abortion drug mifepristone is regulated. Asked by CNN about a dozen specific regulatory or legal decisions concerning national abortion policy that are facing the incoming Trump administration, a spokesperson for his transition said, “President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.” The federal government, however, still plays a major role in shaping abortion policies — from approving the using abortion drugs and deciding how they can be obtained, to directing federal public health funding, to crafting agency rules that have sought to make the procedure easier to access in the wake of Roe’s reversal.