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Trump’s rebranding of the Gag Rule marks a frontal assault on human rights — not just for the four million patients that Title X providers serve annually, but also the community-based health care providers that struggle to narrow abysmal gaps in healthcare services. (The new domestic gag rule is a reflection of a similar anti-abortion rule for international aid funding instituted by every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan.) By muddling medicine and religious orthodoxy, moreover, the Gag Rule also threaten to erode the ethical integrity of the health care workforce, imposing the impossible choice on clinicians to either obey the law that funds their programs, or to uphold ethical responsibilities to their patients. (Michelle Chen, 2/25)

Planned Parenthood wants to be considered a benevolent health-care provider rather than the nation’s largest abortion business, and it wants the cachet of the federal government’s treating it as a valued and non-controversial partner. Hence the frequent, though long-debunked, claim that abortion makes up a mere 3 percent of the organization’s activities. Planned Parenthood’s own annual report tells the real tale: Last fiscal year alone, its facilities performed upwards of 332,000 abortion procedures, well over one-third the estimated abortions in the entire country. Its new president, Leana Wen, was more candid last month when she said that “protecting and expanding access to abortion” is the group’s “core mission.” (2/26)

In its continuing assault on reproductive rights, the Trump administration has issued potentially devastating changes to the nation’s nearly 50-year-old family planning program, Title X, which allows millions of women each year to afford contraception, cancer screenings and other critical health services. Health clinics have long been barred from using Title X money, or any federal funds, to pay for abortions, but they have been able to provide abortions and other family planning services under one roof. (2/26)

Republicans have long used their party’s opposition to abortion as a rallying cry and a way to turn out voters. Now, they seem to be gearing up to make abortion a core issue in the 2020 race. A key component of that strategy: painting Democrats as radical baby-killers. This week, Senate Republicans advocated a bill that seemed designed to do just that. (Eugene Scott, 2/26)

Trump announced that his administration will bar organizations that provide abortion referrals from participating in the $286 million Title X federal family-planing program that serves more than 4 million patients, mostly low-income women. Congress can’t make it right. Not with Trump poised to veto corrective legislation. (2/26)

On Feb. 5, during the State of the Union address, President Trump implied that women like me executed our babies after birth. On Tuesday, he repeated that same lie on Twitter after the nonsensical Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act failed to gain enough votes in the Senate to move forward. The bill would have put in place requirements for the care of infants born after failed abortions and might have locked up doctors who failed to comply. It is unclear how this bill might affect situations where parents decline, for medically appropriate reasons, to have their newborns resuscitated. The threat of criminal prosecution does not enhance anyone’s medical care. (Jen Gunter, 2/26)