The Trump administration is using a US federal funding provision to make abortion care less accessible, threatening states with devastating federal funding cuts for protecting the right to abortion.
The provision, known as the Weldon Amendment and attached to federal spending bills since 2005, is meant to prevent states from treating differently under state law health care providers, practitioners, and insurance plans who refuse to provide abortion care.
Although the Weldon Amendment’s emphasis on the prerogatives of such providers has always been misguided, the administration’s aggressive use of the provision is a new and dangerous turn.
In January, the Trump administration threatened the US state of Illinois with funding cuts over its policies requiring healthcare providers who refuse abortion care due to conscientious objection to refer patients to providers who can. An additional 13 states are under investigation for policies that aim to secure wider access to abortion care, which could result in devastating consequences including perhaps even the loss of all their federal health funding. This puts women’s health care and the millions of Americans who rely on federally funded health centers at risk.
Human Rights Watch has documented in Argentina and Romania how weakly regulated and inconsistently applied conscientious objection provisions can prevent women and girls from finding safe and timely health care and how women from marginalized groups have fewer resources to access alternative care in a timely manner.
Since the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, 13 states now enforce total abortion bans, while others impose harsh limits on when a pregnancy can be ended. Dangerous delays and restrictions on abortion have led to women dying from preventable deaths after being denied timely care.
The Weldon Amendment is not only a threat to women’s health, it is also inconsistent with international human rights standards on conscientious objection. Under these standards, only individual providers should be able to exercise conscientious objections, not institutions – which is not the case under Weldon. Secondly, states should ensure conscientious objection does not become a barrier to health care access, guaranteeing that a provider who refuses care must also make referrals in a timely manner.
Everyone has the right to health, which requires access to the best possible quality health care, and access to abortion is an essential component of this right. The US Congress should repeal the Weldon Amendment, ensuring it can no longer be weaponized to restrict the right to health.
