As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to the Helms Amendment—a decades-old policy that keeps women abroad from accessing safe abortion—as a tool.
We’re at an inflection point in the long, harmful history of the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act. Enacted 51 years ago this month in the wake of Roe v. Wade, the amendment stipulates “no foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” The State Department, USAID and other federal agencies have often broadly interpreted the Helms Amendment as a total ban on U.S. funding for abortion care—even in cases of rape, incest or a life-threatening pregnancy.
As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to Helms as a tool. It calls for using the amendment to enforce a complete ban on using any U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions abroad, period, no matter the circumstances.
At the same time, there’s also a bill pending in Congress to repeal the Helms Amendment.
The stakes in this fight are extremely high. The U.S. is the largest bilateral donor for sexual and reproductive health services, and millions of people worldwide depend on that U.S. funding. When interpreted as a total abortion ban, Helms limits care and contributes to poor health outcomes. Unable to access abortion through trusted programs, patients may turn to clandestine, unsafe abortions—a leading and preventable cause of maternal mortality globally. Data show that a Helms repeal would result in a 98 percent decline in maternal mortality from unsafe abortion. Undoubtedly, the U.S. has a fiscal and social responsibility to support, fund and protect comprehensive reproductive health care for all. Instead, its policies continuously push people toward preventable injury and death.
Everyone—no matter who they are or where they live—has a human right to sexual and reproductive healthcare. Yet the most marginalized are the most likely to be denied it, and suffer the worst impacts. This is especially so for those in low- and middle-income countries, Black and brown people, young people, people experiencing poverty, the LGBTQI+ community, and survivors of sexual violence.
Those caught up in humanitarian crises are at even higher risk. Wars, natural disasters, climate change and displacement uproot communities and intensify exposure to poverty and hardship. In conflict zones, women and girls face an elevated threat of sexual violence. Rape, exploitation and abuse can be used as weapons of war. The risk of sexual and gender-based violence may increase in refugee camps and shelters with poor lighting, crowds and unsafe communal sanitation facilities.
It’s a fact: When women and girls are in the midst of conflict, their exposure to violence skyrockets. And beyond these ever-present threats, sex, pregnancy and childbirth do not pause in emergency situations. Yet, the Helms Amendment prevents the world’s most vulnerable from receiving basic care. Helms prevents individuals from engaging in personal decision-making and realizing their full bodily autonomy—a particularly unforgivable offense for those who have experienced sexual violence.
The Helms Amendment must go.
The U.S. is the largest bilateral donor for sexual and reproductive health services, and millions of people worldwide depend on that U.S. funding.
The pending Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act—led in the House by Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and in the Senate by Cory Booker (D-N.J.)—would remove Helms’ language from the Foreign Assistance Act and specify that U.S. foreign assistance funding can be used for the provision of abortion in countries where abortion is legal.
The bill has 163 co-sponsors in the House and 24 co-sponsors in the Senate. It’s now awaiting review by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
For years, Congressional champions of the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act have stressed the fundamental need for Helms’ repeal, emphasizing action as “a matter of life and death.” Meanwhile, more than a half century after it was passed, the Helms Amendment is still with us, effectively letting the U.S. use foreign assistance funding as a bargaining chip for global political conformity.
Those most in need of care are bearing the brunt of the impact. We can craft a safer, healthier world that protects the human rights of its inhabitants. And in that world, the Helms Amendment will be a calamitous token of the past.
