Trump Poised To Ditch Taxpayer-Funded Abortion For Veterans

The Trump administration advanced its goal to eliminate taxpayer-funded abortion this week when it proposed ditching a Biden administration-era rule that forced taxpayers to subsidize veterans’ abortions.

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in his second term was prohibiting Americans’ hard-earned dollars from going to organizations that lobby for, perform, or encourage abortions in other countries. The reinstatement of President Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy brought the U.S. back up to speed with Americans’ majority opposition to taxpayer-funded abortions — especially overseas.

Now, six months into the Trump administration’s return, the Department of Veteran Affairs proposed a rule to rescind a 2022 policy that lumped abortions and “abortion counseling” into veterans’ taxpayer-funded medical benefits package.

“We believe the 2022 interim final rule was not only inappropriate as a matter of fact but also was legally questionable,” the August 4th notice posted to the federal register states.

As the proposed rule notes, “the regulatory determination that abortion is not a ‘needed’ service for veterans was accepted by every Secretary and Presidential administration for over 20 years.” It wasn’t until the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling in 2022 that the Biden administration saw an opportunity to advance its abortion agenda through the VA.

“But this conclusion contradicted decades of Federal policy against forced taxpayer funding for abortion,” the proposed rule continues.

The VA also noted that “the Biden administration predicted a high demand for VA abortions that never materialized.”

In an effort to get ahead of abortion activists, Democrats, and corporate media’s lies about the potential policy change, the VA emphasized that the Biden administration’s claims that abortions “are needed to save the lives of pregnant women are incorrect.” In fact, the proposed rule stresses that there are no state laws preventing women suffering ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages from receiving care.

“The lives of pregnant women will continue to be protected without regard for the previous administration’s rule. Thus, prior Administrations recognized that lifesaving procedures would still be performed under the medical benefits package, and this was explicit in the prior versions of the CHAMPVA regulation,” the rule proposal states.

Americans have until September 3 to comment on the policy change. Until then, the VA maintains that excluding abortion from veterans’ medical benefits package “is consistent with VA’s decades-long interpretation of the law, the reversal of which served only to unnecessarily redefine VA’s medical benefits package based on politics instead of science.”

“This proposed rule restores VA to its proper role as the United States’ provider of needed medical services to those who served, delivered on behalf of a grateful nation,” the proposal concludes.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.