Trump Rule Would Bar Abortion Referrals for Undecided Patients

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s proposal to impose new abortion restrictions on federal family planning money would bar doctors from informing a woman where she could go to receive an abortion, unless she said she had already decided to end her pregnancy.

The proposed rule submitted last week, a copy of which was posted on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website, would bar clinics or programs that receive federal family planning funds from providing abortions or referring women to places that do, imposing what it calls a “bright line” of separation. It takes direct aim at Planned Parenthood and reproductive health organizations like it, which provide a range of women’s health services, including abortions.

Trump is expected to promote the new proposal — a top priority of social conservatives who have been among his staunchest supporters — at a gala Tuesday night for the Susan B. Anthony List, a leading anti-abortion organization.

The policy states that money distributed under Title X — the 1970 statute that created the federal family planning program — must be “physically and financially separate from programs in which abortion is provided or presented as a method of family planning, including programs that refer for abortions and programs that encourage, promote or advocate abortion as a method of family planning.”

The proposal falls short of the so-called domestic gag rule that was proposed under President Ronald Reagan in 1988, which prohibited organizations that received Title X money from even mentioning abortion. But it does do away with a requirement that family planning centers counsel women about abortion and provide referrals for it.

“A doctor, though not required to do so, would be permitted to provide nondirective counseling on abortion,” the proposed rule says. In that case, it says, a physician could provide a list of health providers, “some (but not all) of which provide abortion in addition to comprehensive prenatal care.”

“Providing such a list would be permitted only in cases where a program client who is currently pregnant clearly states that she has already decided to have an abortion,” the rule says.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights advocates have argued since the proposal surfaced last week that it still constitutes a gag rule because it would stop health care providers from discussing certain things with their patients.

In a statement Tuesday evening, Planned Parenthood called the proposal a “nationwide gag rule” that was “straight out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,'” the dystopian novel in which women are treated as reproductive slaves. The group criticized language specifying that federally funded family planning organizations no longer must provide every form of birth control, and the omission of an existing requirement that contraceptive methods they furnish be “medically approved.”

“This is one of the largest-scale and most dangerous attacks we’ve seen on women’s rights and reproductive health care in this country,” said Dawn Laguens, of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.