On Friday, the Trump administration inflicted yet another bit of needless, bigoted cruelty when it announced that it would bar organizations that provide abortions or abortion referrals from receiving funding under Title X, the federal family planning program.

Yes, I do want your taxes to pay for abortion | Moira Donegan Read more

The Hyde Amendment, a sexist and unfair provision, already prohibits any federal funding from being used for abortions. The new regulations, designed specifically to remove funding from Planned Parenthood, would make it impossible for low-income patients to receive birth control, cervical and breast cancer screenings, STD testing or treatment, pelvic exams or sex education from any organization that provides abortions or even tells their patients where they can get one. It prevents groups that provide abortions from using this federal money to provide any reproductive health services at all.

The move to threatens to have a broad impact. About 4 million people receive Title X-funded services every year, and they tend to be among the most vulnerable: they are disproportionately young, low-income and uninsured. Most people who use the funds are women who do not have medical insurance through an employer and are ineligible for Medicaid; their incomes are too high to qualify for free care, but too low for them to afford insurance out of pocket. The funds disproportionately help people of color: 21% of Title X patients are black, and 30% identify as Latino.

Sign up to receive the latest US opinion pieces every weekday

About 4,100 clinics around the country provide services that are Title X funded. But if the new rule goes into effect, the total number of clinics that can use the money will drop dramatically. The result is that Title X funds will now be concentrated in fewer organizations – and many of the groups that this money will now go to have anti-woman agendas.

Instead of going to women’s health facilities that offer a full range of reproductive health services, like Planned Parenthood, the Title X money – roughly $286m a year – will now be going to anti-woman, anti-science groups like so-called crisis pregnancy centers, the fake clinics that attempt to coerce and shame women into remaining pregnant even when they do not want to be. Some money will also go to other faith-based, predominantly Christian, initiatives. In other words, money that was earmarked to help women stay healthy and make independent, informed choices about their own bodies will now be given to organizations that have a track record of lying to women in order to constrain their choices.

In fact, the supreme court has already ruled that crisis pregnancy centers are legally allowed to lie to patients who come to them seeking medical care, a reality that is unlikely to change now that these groups are going to be entrusted with millions in additional federal funds. Money that was meant to help women will now be given to people who actively hurt and deceive them.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that Title X funds prevented 822,000 unintended pregnancies in 2015 alone – which, according to their data, means that the program prevented about 278,000 abortions that year. This does not account for the illnesses and deaths that are prevented by the STD and cancer screenings that the program also pays for. You would think that anti-choice activists would be happy about this, claiming as they do that they are “pro-life”. But the push to remove Title X funding from Planned Parenthood has long been a loud and angry demand of the religious right. It is not the first time that the anti-choice movement’s professed respect for “life” has been undermined by their actual choices and priorities. The anti-choice movement’s actions only make sense if you understand them to be motivated not by a respect for “life”, but by a hatred of women.

Women’s rights groups are certain to challenge the new Title X rules in federal court. But if the fight is headed to the supreme court, it is likely that the Trump administration’s move to inflict more suffering on women will be gleefully upheld by the misogynist conservative majority, led by multiply accused sexual assault perpetrator Brett Kavanaugh and credibly accused sexual harasser Clarence Thomas.

It bears emphasizing that it is unjust for women’s freedoms to be determined overwhelmingly by people such as Trump, Kavanaugh, and Thomas, who have been open and frank about their personal capacities for sexist contempt. This state of affairs, in which women are asked to submit, again, to the authority of men who hate them, is an ongoing insult to women. It makes the notion of our equal protection under the law seem like a patronizing fiction.

In 1975, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote: “Our enemies – rapists and their defenders – not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists and teachers.” They are also, at the moment, the president of the United States, and two associate justices of the US supreme court.