The flurry of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump during his first week in office has been staggering. The orders have oftentimes been cruel, dubiously legal and frankly, mind-boggling. But their sheer number — coupled with an unprecedented, far-reaching freeze on both foreign aid and domestic federal funds — is intended to do just that: confuse and overwhelm. In many ways, some of the orders amount to little more than “glorified press releases” given their inability to actually change the law, Chase Strangio, co-director of the LGBTQ & HIV Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote on Instagram ahead of Trump’s inauguration.

Case in point: On January 24, Trump issued an executive order on reproductive rights titled, “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment.” The order claims, falsely, that policies by President Joe Biden’s administration “forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs.” The Hyde Amendment, however, has banned the use of federal funds for abortion care since 1977 — and reproductive rights advocates have long challenged this pernicious law. Framing his latest executive order as “enforcing the Hyde Amendment” is just another one of Trump’s strategies to sow confusion.

So what does the executive order do? Truthout spoke with Amy Friedrich-Karnik, federal policy director of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy nonprofit dedicated to advancing reproductive health and rights in the U.S. and around the world. Friedrich-Karnik unpacked Trump’s actions on reproductive rights so far and their implications for people seeking abortion care.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Schuyler Mitchell: To start us off, what sort of executive orders on reproductive healthcare were in place under President Joe Biden’s administration, and what was the impact of those policies on people seeking abortion care?

Amy Friedrich-Karnik: I think it is false of the Trump administration to invoke the Hyde Amendment in the way that they framed their executive order, because nothing that the Biden administration did violated the Hyde Amendment. Essentially, the Trump administration’s order revoked two of the Biden administration’s executive orders issued in the weeks and months right after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. The first executive order was a whole-of-government approach to what the federal government can do within the bounds of the law, including the Hyde Amendment, to support and promote information and access to abortion care where it remained available. Then you had different actions and guidances that came from that, with the goal of expanding access to and information about abortion care, but none of those actions violated the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being put toward the provision of abortion care.

Biden’s executive order, for instance, created a Medicaid 1115 demonstration waiver that would allow states to assist patients traveling across state lines for care. The waivers are a way for states to ask the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to do different things with their Medicaid dollars, to either reach certain populations or provide certain types of healthcare services through Medicaid. So, if a state wanted to use its Medicaid dollars to help with those transportation expenses for abortion patients, it could apply for that waiver. I will say that only California applied, and it was not even yet approved or in practice at the end of the Biden administration.

Another kind of policy that resulted out of Biden’s executive orders was the establishment of the Interagency Task Force on Reproductive Health Care Access. Eventually, you also had a whole new regulation around the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and expanding privacy protections for folks and their reproductive health care information. There was also the work that was done around EMTALA, or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. The administration issued clarification on what was already in EMTALA and gave clear guidance that, as the law states, emergency rooms........

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