(LifeSiteNews) — A federal government website offering resources to help women obtain abortions went dark on the first day of the second Trump administration in what pro-lifers are taking as a hopeful sign for the incoming Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Established in 2022 under former President Joe Biden, ReproductiveRights.gov was billed as providing “accurate and up-to-date information about access to and coverage of reproductive health care and resources” in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, enabling states to set their own abortion regulations and even fully ban it if they so choose. It also offered a portal for submitting complaints to the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) over “discriminatory restrictions on access to health care.”
Trump took the oath of office Monday, and within hours it was noticed that the website’s URL now redirects to an error screen. No one from the Trump administration has officially commented on the move, and CBS News reported that a request for comment went unanswered.
Nevertheless, the move offers a small but hopeful window into just what shape the abortion policies of the second Trump administration will take. After the 2022 midterm elections, in which many pundits erroneously blamed Republican underperformance on the party’s long-held pro-life stand, Trump began a dramatic retreat from the pro-life record of his first term.
While continuing to take credit for his judicial nominees’ part in overturning Roe, Trump aggressively came out against federally banning abortion to the point of promising to veto any such bill that reached his desk, forced a rewrite of the Republican Party platform to remove its long-standing commitment to eventually banning abortion nationwide, boasted about making the GOP less “radical” on the issue, criticized multiple state pro-life laws for being “too tough,” proclaimed himself the “father” of embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization, and pledged to continue Biden’s non-prosecution of mailing abortion pills – all while assuming (correctly, as it turned out) that most pro-life voters would decide he was still preferable to radically pro-abortion Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Voters strongly rejected Democrats in 2024 despite their aggressive pro-abortion messaging that pro-lifers argue should be taken as a sign that Trump and the GOP hold firm to pro-life goals.
Since the election, Trump has given pro-lifers reason to hope for at least some positive changes on abortion policy, including statements that he will “look” at reinstating the Mexico City Policy against international abortion funding, reported commitments by his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to reinstate several pro-life policies of the first Trump HHS and hire pro-life subordinates (despite Kennedy’s own “pro-choice” position), and testimony by Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi that she will end the Biden Justice Department’s targeting of peaceful pro-life activists.