Americans searching for reproductive health resources will have one less option after President Donald Trump’s new administration on Monday made shuttering a government website focused on women's health care among the first moves of his second presidency.
Hours after Trump was inaugurated as the country’s 47th president, it was reported that the website ReproductiveRights.gov shutdown.
The website provided information on “birth control, medication, abortion services, and other preventive health services, as well as important facts about privacy, rights associated with reproductive health care, and how people with and without health insurance can obtain reproductive health care,” according to the Office of Population Affairs.
Jan. 15 is the last day that the site was recorded as active, Bloomberg reported, citing the Wayback Machine's internet archive. The move comes as reproductive rights groups and activists nationwide plan to launch a vigorous pushback on the new administration’s policies on women’s health care.
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Sweeping changes to reproductive rights in the new Trump administration with a Republican-controlled Congress in place had been predicted.
“President Biden issued several executive orders and memorandums and took other actions to protect and expand access to reproductive health services,” The Guttmacher Institute wrote in November, as reported by Bloomberg. “Expect the Trump-Vance administration to quickly nullify these efforts.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights said Monday that its legal experts expect Trump will try to rescind approval of medication abortion or make it much harder to access, among other efforts to dismantle reproductive-related protections.
“Expecting even more extreme actions in his second term, we are on high alert and prepared to sue at a moment’s notice,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement Monday. “Our fighting force of lawyers is prepared to block or delay the administration’s most harmful actions. We will be in court every day for the next four years, if that’s what it takes.”
