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Trump Could Further His Pro-Life U.S. Foreign Policy by Enforcing Existing Law

Rebecca Oas is Director of Research at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), which is based in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The Trump administration has taken many steps—some of them truly unprecedented—to advance pro-life policies, both domestically and abroad.

President Donald Trump could do one thing to protect life and send a powerful pro-life message internationally, simply by enforcing an existing law you may have never heard of. It’s called the Siljander Amendment and dates to 1981.

In recent days, Trump expanded the Mexico City Policy exponentially. This is the law that renders entities that promote or provide abortions ineligible for U.S. foreign assistance funding. The new policy goes further by plugging key loopholes in the policy’s earlier iterations and expands its scope to include gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology as well as abortion.

One key addition to the policy is that it now applies to multilateral organizations, which is important both because agencies of the United Nations and the Organizations of American States, or OAS, have a history of receiving generous funding from the U.S. and of promoting abortion.

In all its iterations, the Mexico City Policy has been an executive order enacted and reinstated by Republican presidents and rescinded by Democrat presidents since the 1980s.

However, it exists as a supplement to a prior law—the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act which bars U.S. funding from directly promoting or providing abortions abroad.

The Mexico City Policy was introduced because money is fungible; it is hard to claim that U.S. taxpayer funding is not complicit in promoting abortion overseas simply because U.S.-funded Planned Parenthood affiliates in foreign countries insists that its abortion work is done with separate funding.

The Siljander Amendment plugged yet another hole and that is the lobbying hole. It prohibits U.S. funds from being used to lobby for or against abortion, something U.S. aid recipients do aggressively and globally. 

During the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defunded two organs of the OAS, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission of Women, because they were lobbying for the legalization of abortion in Latin American and Caribbean countries.

At the time, the same approach was not taken with UN agencies, but it should be now, and for the same reason. UN entities frothily lobby and pressure countries on abortion in violation of this amendment. 

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights supports the work of the human rights treaty monitoring bodies and special mandate holders, many of which have explicitly called on countries to decriminalize abortion entirely, legalize it for all grounds, and remove any barriers to access, including by violating the conscience rights of health care providers.

Another UN entity with a long track record of lobbying for abortion is the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction. While housed within the World Health Organization, it is a joint program of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Population Fund, United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Bank, all of which have been recipients of U.S. funding in recent years.

In 2022 the HRP published its latest guideline on “safe abortion,” which calls for recommend full decriminalization of abortion, which says should be available on the request of the woman (they say “pregnant person”), without restrictions based on grounds or gestational age. A 2025 update to the guideline called for heightened restrictions on conscientious objection.

The HRP often posts infographics to social media with messages like “abortion is healthcare,” “abortion should never be criminalized,” and “quality abortion care is part of the universal right to health.”

There is no internationally agreed human right to abortion, and UN consensus by member states holds that its legal status is for individual governments to determine.

The Siljander Amendment is U.S. law, and it should apply to U.S. taxpayer funding to multilateral institutions, which have historically been generously supported by the U.S.

It must be enforced regardless of the policy preferences of whoever inhabits the White House. As it clearly states, it would also apply to any UN agency that lobbies against abortion—although finding one of those might be more difficult than achieving what the UN was established to do, like ending war and poverty.

In keeping Trump’s record of defunding agencies that violate our values, he should take a close look at this little-used tool. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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