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Pandering, and Endangering Women

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Credit...Chloe Scheffe

Appealing to the religious right, Donald Trump is set to make good on his campaign promise to defund Planned Parenthood. In the process, he will put at risk women’s access not only to abortion but to birth control, Pap tests, sexually transmitted infection screenings and other health services.

Administration officials say they plan to put in place a version of the so-called domestic gag rule, which would bar funding under the federal Title X family planning program for clinics that make abortion referrals or that provide abortions themselves. The rule could devastate groups like Planned Parenthood, preventing them from providing a range of reproductive health services and curtailing women’s constitutionally protected right to abortion.

During the 2016 campaign, even as Mr. Trump called for eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood because the organization provides abortions — a small fraction of its services, he then noted — he acknowledged what would be lost. “Millions and millions of women — cervical cancer, breast cancer — are helped by Planned Parenthood,” he said. “So you can say whatever you want, but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly.”

The organization — an evil specter for social conservatives — has clinics that receive significant funding through the Title X program, which since 1971 has helped low-income women afford services like contraception and cancer screenings. Title X does not pay for abortions — federal funding for abortion is banned in a vast majority of cases in the United States — but women’s health clinics have long been able to provide both abortion care and family planning services in the same facility, as long as they keep those funding streams separate. One current requirement under Title X is that patients receive a referral for abortions, whether the abortion takes place at that facility or elsewhere. Clinics must also counsel patients about the procedure.

The Reagan administration rewrote those Title X regulations to create the gag rule, prohibiting other services from being provided in the same place as abortions, and banning abortion referrals and counseling. Planned Parenthood and other providers challenged the legality of the move; although the Supreme Court ultimately decided in 1991 that the rule changes were permissible, those changes never fully went into effect, and President Bill Clinton rescinded them when he came into office in 1993.

The Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump will not bar or require abortion counseling. But its rule would come between patients and their doctors, denying crucial care. Over all, the Trump administration has kowtowed more fervently to religious conservatives than the Reagan administration. It has pushed ineffective, abstinence-only education while chipping away at access to contraception and giving hope to those who wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned. It has also imposed an expanded global gag rule preventing overseas clinics that receive American health aid from providing or discussing abortion.

Women’s health advocates have fought back against these efforts. They filed a lawsuit early this month over other changes to the Title X program. But this will be a long and uphill battle against a president who appears not to know the difference between H.I.V. and HPV — the human papillomavirus, a leading cause of cervical cancer.

His capitulation to the anti-abortion movement could deal a significant blow to women. They shouldn’t forget that betrayal.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Pandering, and Endangering Women. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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