The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump White House spent Mother’s Day launching Moms.gov, a government-branded bait-and-switch that pretends to offer "Resources, Information, and Help" to pregnant women and then basically just shoves them toward Option Line, a network of Christian anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. The site omits trivial luxuries like contraception, paid leave, or actual medical care, but it does feature faceless stock photos of very pregnant white women and the anti-abortion movement’s beloved fetus-footprint iconography, because nothing says "you are a vessel, not a person" like cropping out your head and surrounding your torso with merch-ready baby feet.

The launch event in the Oval Office was a full-cast dystopia. Medicare/Medicaid boss Mehmet Oz announced Americans are "under-babied" and predicted a wave of "Trump babies," while HHS Secretary RFK Jr. warned that teen sperm counts are an "existential crisis" for America. Trump himself appeared to briefly lose consciousness during the fertility panic hour, which, to be fair, is the most relatable policy response he’s had in years. Behind the weird vibes is a clear project: rebuild the anti-abortion movement’s enthusiasm by using federal power to funnel women into fake clinics that lie about gestational age, overstate legal limits, and dangle diapers and cribs that often never arrive unless you sit through a sermon.

This isn’t social policy; it’s state-sponsored gaslighting. After Dobbs, abortion bans tanked Republicans in the midterms and Trump decided the movement he unleashed didn’t deserve any more gifts. Now, with 2026 looming, that “pause” is over: the administration has dumped an insufficiently anti-abortion FDA chief, is eyeing mifepristone restrictions, and has rolled out Moms.gov as a glossy interface for coercion. It’s a perfect metaphor for Trump’s government: dress up patriarchal control in soft-focus stock imagery, slap a federal URL on it, and call it "help" while you quietly strip people of autonomy and lie to them on the public dime.

Republicans finally did it: they owned the libs so hard that Planned Parenthood clinics are now running side hustles as Botox bars to keep the lights on. After Donald Trump and Congress jammed through a tax-and-spending package that blocks Planned Parenthood and any abortion provider from taking Medicaid for non-abortion care, the country’s largest affiliate in Northern California is plugging the budget crater with cash-only cosmetic procedures, IV drips for hangovers, and sedation upsells.

This is what "pro-life" governance looks like in practice: 75–80% of their patients are on Medi-Cal, but instead of letting poor women use their health insurance for Pap smears and IUDs, the federal government told clinics to go find some side gig in the gig economy. So now reproductive health providers are doing aesthetic injectables to subsidize birth control and cancer screenings, while the same politicians who caused the crisis will soon point at the Botox menu and shriek that Planned Parenthood is a frivolous beauty shop that doesn’t need funding. It’s not healthcare policy; it’s a long con where low-income patients pay the price and Congress pretends it’s fiscal responsibility.

The National Institutes of Health, formerly known as the world’s biggest public funder of biomedical research and now apparently a branch office of the Heritage Foundation, has announced it will no longer fund any research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions. NIH director Jay Bhattacharya – because nothing says “cutting-edge medicine” like elevating a Great Barrington Declaration guy – declared that this is all about “advancing science” and “reflecting the values of the American people,” which is an extremely polite way of saying: theocrats yelled, Trump listened, science loses.

This is the most sweeping move yet in the administration’s long-running crusade to kneecap fetal tissue research, which has been crucial for work on diabetes, Alzheimer’s, infertility, and, minor detail, vaccines for things like polio, hepatitis A, and rabies. Researchers can still use tissue from miscarriages, but scientists overwhelmingly prefer donated tissue from abortions because it’s actually usable and not riddled with the genetic problems that often cause miscarriages in the first place. In other words, the NIH just took a proven, life-saving research pipeline and smashed it in favor of whatever “breakthrough technologies” Jay’s friends in the culture war think sound holy enough on Fox News.

The ban takes effect immediately, yanking support from roughly $60m worth of 2024 projects and sending a very clear message: if your work offends the anti-abortion lobby, you’re done. The administration is calling this “modernization,” which is an interesting rebrand for “we’re discarding decades of scientific progress so Trump can keep his base hopped up on moral panic.” But sure, canceling research that helped create vaccines and fight major diseases is just another big win for “pro-life” governance – as long as you don’t count the actual living people who’ll suffer.

The Trump-Vance administration has decided that nothing says "thank you for your service" like denying raped veterans basic medical care. The Department of Justice quietly issued a memo declaring that the Department of Veterans Affairs is not "legally authorized" to provide abortions, even in cases of rape, incest, or serious health risk. The VA, ever the loyal foot soldier, immediately complied, snapping shut access to care that Biden-era rules had finally opened up for veterans in the post-Roe hellscape.

The internal memo, leaked and published by Democracy Forward, carves out a tiny, grudging exception: doctors can still act if a veteran is literally about to die from pregnancy complications. Miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or a clinician determining that care is "necessary to save a veteran’s life" might still be allowed — assuming, of course, lawyers and political appointees don’t overrule the medical chart. But counseling about abortion? Care in cases of rape or incest? That’s gone, because nothing screams "pro-life" like forcing a veteran who survived combat and sexual assault to navigate a patchwork of state bans on her own dime.

More than half of female veterans live in states that have banned or are likely to ban abortion. Biden’s VA policy was one of the few lifelines left; Trump’s team is cutting it off while the formal rule rollback slowly oozes through the bureaucracy. In other words, they’re not even waiting to finish the paperwork before slamming the door. As Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward put it, the move is callous and inhumane. But sure, tell us again how this administration "backs the troops" while it turns VA hospitals into enforcement arms for forced birth.