Facing pressure from MAHA mothers and social conservatives, President Donald Trump‘s administration is shifting family planning policy away from contraceptives such as birth control pills and toward methods aimed at boosting childbirth.
The move is the latest attempt by the White House to shore up support among key factions that have grown increasingly critical of the administration for failing to prioritize core base issues.
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Recent guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services prioritizes “effective family planning methods and services” such as tracking periods over other options, including the pill, a shift likely to please the Make America Healthy Again coalition and social conservatives, especially as anger has grown over the lack of action on decreasing abortion. The word contraception appears just once in the document.
Established in 1970, Title X is the sole federal grant program focused on providing low-cost family planning and preventive health services. It has prevented millions of unintended pregnancies by providing cost-effective birth control.
“The Title X program will continue to deliver on this mission of ensuring access to a broad range of family planning and preventive health services,” a White House official told the Washington Examiner. “President Trump campaigned on Making America Healthy Again and addressing fertility concerns for Americans looking to start families. Infertility services are part of the acceptable and effective family planning methods included in statute, and the grant announcement shows a commitment to broadening Title X services to best meet the health needs of women and families.”
Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor who studies the politics of reproduction at the University of California, called the new guidance a complete overhaul of government programming on birth control in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Ziegler added she was surprised “that the administration feels more comfortable coming after birth control than it does abortion,” citing longtime support for the pill.
“I don’t know if people would have anticipated that the administration would be this receptive on contraception and so slow on abortion,” Ziegler said.
In recent years, social media influencers, religious conservatives, and the MAHA movement have given rise to persuasive criticisms of birth control side effects, including weight gain, low libido, and higher risks of blood clots. Data from YouGov showed that 25% of women who have never taken hormonal birth control said it was because they were concerned about side effects.
“I think also that there’s been more of a market for anti-birth control messaging than the Trump administration anticipated,” Ziegler said. “Birth control research in the U.S. has stalled in the past. … And so there are people who would like better birth control options who aren’t getting them.”
Some anti-abortion groups have touted the administration’s efforts to provide other family planning options even as they have pushed the White House to take more aggressive actions to limit the number of abortions in the nation.
“Reversing the anti-baby bias of federal policy is a welcome change from Democratic Party prejudice in policy against families welcoming children,” said Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy for Students for Life. “Life is also a choice, but so much policy has put the federal finger on the scale of abortion or of hormonal birth control.”
“Many young women are looking for more natural, healthier ways of living,” Hamrick said. “This is about creating new options for people who should be able to choose from all that’s available and not just what Planned Parenthood wants to sell and bill the taxpayers for.”
Students for Life is among several anti-abortion groups that have grown frustrated over the lack of progress in defunding Planned Parenthood. A narrower second reconciliation bill is not guaranteed to include language stripping the group of federal Medicaid reimbursements. The group pushed the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibits the shipping of abortion-related drugs through the mail.
The anti-abortion movement was particularly incensed after the Food and Drug Administration approved a second generic version of the abortion pill mifepristone, and as reports claimed, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary allegedly put off a long-awaited safety review of mifepristone until after the midterm elections.
The widely diverse MAHA coalition has also grown weary of the Trump administration after it pulled Casey Means’s nomination as the nation’s surgeon general. Means is an MAHA influencer and vaccine skeptic who did not have the support of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), himself a doctor, which thwarted her nomination.
The coalition is also incensed over the administration’s support for Bayer in the Monsanto Company v. Durnell case before the Supreme Court regarding the handling of the herbicide glyphosate, the main chemical in Roundup.
“If our government won’t tell us the truth about how glyphosate causes cancer, we will,” said MAHA leader and health activist Vani Hari during a protest in front of the high court.
Against that backdrop, the push for natural family planning methods could help ease tensions with these groups and bolster pro-natal allies.
Patrick T. Brown, fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the new guidance “a great move” in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“We’re well overdue for a better conversation around what family planning actually means,” he said. “Moving away from some of these methods that I think are seen as more invasive, more artificial … towards a more holistic approach … could be a big win.”
“A lot of people have wanted to see other kinds of family planning options,” added one anti-abortion advocate who requested anonymity. “It’s been limited to hormonal birth control on the whole and the kind of products that Planned Parenthood likes to sell.”
The pro-family and anti-abortion movements have long bemoaned “the prejudicial policy” that points in one direction of family planning methods.
“It is a welcome thing to reverse this prejudice, because a program that is supposed to be about family planning should not be limited toward fertility suppression with hormones as sold by Planned Parenthood,” the advocate said while also insisting more work be done to limit access to abortion.
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Heading into a tough midterm cycle, the Trump administration has a strong incentive to tamp down tensions among allies who they need to turn out and vote. It’s not clear how much the new guidance will ease frustrations.
“I don’t know if changing the regulatory guidance on Title 10 is enough to change people’s minds,” Brown said. “But it’s a sign that [the White House is] taking this stuff seriously. And even if they can’t deliver the big wins that some of these groups would like, a bigger Child Tax Credit or whatever it happens to be, they’re at least saying, ‘Hey, we’re listening to you. We hear you.'”
