Trump's war on women: How political violence and policy converge
Vance Boelter is an extension of the GOP's ideal patriarchal hierarchy
Last week, a Trump supporter named Vance Boelter carried out a politically motivated double homicide in Minnesota, killing a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in what authorities describe as a targeted assassination spree. Found in his possession was a hit list containing dozens of potential targets, including abortion rights advocates and Planned Parenthood facilities.
According to available evidence, Boelter was an anti-abortion zealot who delivered evangelical sermons in the Democratic Republic of the Congo decrying American churches for their failure to stop the expansion of reproductive rights.
As horrific as Boelter’s rampage was, it could have been far worse. The Trump administration has emboldened anti-abortion extremists like him by dismantling protections for reproductive clinics and pardoning individuals convicted of threatening, assaulting, or obstructing clinic staff and patients. This pattern of state-sanctioned intimidation doesn’t just invite more violence—it’s part of a broader campaign to dismantle women’s rights and reimpose a strict patriarchal order soaked in Christian nationalism.
That conclusion is unavoidable once you begin examining the administration’s policies and its most high-profile officials. Take Vice President JD Vance, for example, who has disparaged childless women, questioned their commitment to society, and suggested their votes should not count. Or Elon Musk, who has been sued for fostering sexism in the workplace and recently reposted a tweet saying that only “high status males” are capable of running the country. Or Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has proposed a new policy directing federal funding to areas with high birth and marriage rates. Or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault and allegedly believes that women should not work, vote, or serve in combat.
This isn’t just a series of isolated incidents; it is a coordinated effort to drag the country backward to a time when women were expected to serve as housekeepers and incubators, without meaningful opportunities for education or career advancement.
The first step in forcing women out of the workforce and back into traditional household roles is stripping them of bodily autonomy through the restriction and criminalization of contraception and abortion care.
According to a literature review by the Guttmacher Institute, access to the birth control pill “was responsible for as much as one-third of the considerable rise in 21–22-year-old women’s college enrollment from 1969 to 1980” and “accounted for more than 30% of the increase in the proportion of women in skilled careers from 1970 to 1990.”
Access to legal abortion (Roe v. Wade) contributed to a 20% increase in women’s national labor force participation. According to the Institute of Women’s Policy Research, we are now seeing the opposite trend—a decline in female employment growth—in states where abortion is currently banned.
The Trump administration froze close to $35 million in federal funding set to be disbursed to Title X Family Planning Program grantees (which includes health departments, school-based providers, and Planned Parenthood clinics), affecting 879 clinics in 23 states. All Title X funding is being withheld from California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Utah, while partial funding is being withheld from 16 other states.
According to one estimate, up to 834,000 people may lose access to Title X-funded care if these funds are not released. These are largely low-income and uninsured individuals that go to Title X clinics to get free or reduced cost contraception and STI testing.
At the same time as cutting Title X funds for a quarter of grantees, the Trump administration restored Title X funding to two conservative states that are in violation of federal law requiring participating clinics to offer abortion referrals. The Tennessee Department of Health and Oklahoma State Department of Health each lost high-profile court cases challenging the Biden administration’s revocation of funding, but continued to refuse to comply with federal law.
The House Republicans’ reconciliation bill would essentially defund Planned Parenthood by cutting off Medicaid reimbursement to any nonprofit that primarily offers family planning or reproductive health services, provides abortions beyond the Hyde Amendment exceptions, and received more than $1 million in Medicaid reimbursements in 2024.
“They know so much of our patient base is on Medicaid or needs Title X to pay for their care, they know that cutting this off will allow them to cut off access to abortion and they are willing to make that trade,” [Ashlea Phenicie, chief external affairs officer of Planned Parenthood of Michigan,] said.
Another provision in the House reconciliation bill would bar Affordable Care Act Marketplace plans that include abortion coverage from receiving newly-appropriated federal payments related to cost-sharing reductions.
The Trump administration rescinded guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). The Department of Justice dismissed its case, originally brought under Biden, against Idaho seeking to ensure hospitals provide life-saving abortions.
The Trump administration fired most of the employees at the HHS Division of Reproductive Health, including the entire team responsible for writing contraception guidelines.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., instructed the FDA "to review the latest data on mifepristone," after a group associated with Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation released a junk science study alleging serious adverse effects. The study’s lead author, Ryan Anderson, wrote a book called “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”
A Texas bill (which fortunately failed to advance this year) foreshadows how anti-abortion lawmakers plan to use environmental law to ban medication abortion. Senate Bill 1976 would have required the state to test the water at wastewater treatment facilities for mifepristone, under the unproven theory that expelled fetal tissue is harming endangered species, contaminating tap water, and threatening human fertility.
The group leading the push, Students for Life of America, is also preparing lawsuits, federal bills and a pressure campaign aimed squarely at the environmental inclinations of Robert F. Kennedy Jr…In particular, [Kennedy] has criticized widespread water contamination from hormone-disrupting chemicals, which he has erroneously linked to “gender confusion” among youth.
Meanwhile, conservative states are creating a dystopian panopticon to surveil and prosecute women for their pregnancy status
A prosecutor in West Virginia warned women earlier this month that “a number” of prosecuting attorneys in the state have discussed their “willingness to file criminal charges against women” who suffer miscarriages in the state. Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman advised women who experience a miscarriage, which is often indistinguishable from a heavy period, to “call law enforcement” to report the incident:
“The kind of criminal jeopardy you face is going to depend on a lot of factors,” Truman explained. “What was your intent? What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something, were you just so emotionally distraught you couldn’t do anything else?”
“If you were relieved, and you had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking, too,” he explained.
The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion. Their search covered cameras in states that protect abortion rights, like Washington and Illinois. We only know about the camera search because the officer entered “had an abortion” into the system as the reason for the search; most often, police only enter “investigation” as the reason for the plate search.
Flock cameras continually scan the plates, color, and model of any vehicle driving by, building a detailed database of vehicles and by extension peoples' movements. Cops are able to search cameras acquired in their own district, those in their state, or those in a nationwide network of Flock cameras. That single search for the woman spread across 6,809 different Flock networks, with a total of 83,345 cameras, according to the data. The officer looked for hits over a month long period, it shows.
A Louisiana woman was indicted earlier this year for helping her pregnant daughter obtain abortion pills, which are classified as “controlled dangerous substances” in the state. Attorney General Liz Murrill indicted a New York doctor for mailing the pills to the woman, but NY Gov. Hochul refused to comply with Louisiana's extradition request.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office arrested a midwife for illegally performing an abortion by giving a client abortion pills. Paxton alleges the midwife was practicing medicine without a license; it is not clear if his version of events is accurate.
The second step in enforcing a patriarchal order is undermining women’s financial independence by dismantling social safety nets and gutting programs designed to address gender inequality.
The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget slashes funding for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program. “Under this proposal, breastfeeding mothers would see their monthly benefits plummet from $52 to just $13, while young children’s benefits would drop from $26 to $10,” according to the National WIC Association.
The House reconciliation bill would cut nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which will disproportionately impact the 63% of SNAP recipients who are women.
The House reconciliation bill would also cut $800 billion from Medicaid, which covers 40% of births—the largest single-payer of maternity care in the United States.
The Department of Labor, under DOGE’s direction, canceled more than two dozen grants administered by the Women’s Bureau to support women’s employment. The grants were used to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology, and to fund programs to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and workplace harassment. Concurrently, the administration has reduced the Bureau’s staffing so significantly that it has ceased to function properly:
The Trump administration has already managed to undermine the bureau’s work without eliminating the office entirely. Nine current and former Labor Department staffers previously told me that the bureau has lost about half of its approximately 50-person staff through a combination of buyouts and resignations, and that their work has essentially been at a standstill since Trump resumed office.
Trump rolled back the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order, which required federal contractors to comply with 14 labor and civil rights laws, including regulations that ensure women receive equal pay as men serving in the same positions. According to a conservative think tank, Trump’s first term White House paid female staffers 37% less than male staffers.
Trump’s proposed 2026 budget proposal eliminates funding for Women’s Business Centers within the U.S. Small Business Administration. The program provides free or low-cost counseling and training to women who want to start, grow, and expand their small business.
The Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies resulted in the cancellation of grant money used to increase the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
In the U.S., STEM professions are highly inequitable and continue to be male and white-dominated. According to one 2023 estimate, only 28 percent of the U.S. STEM workforce is women. Women professors in STEM face significant barriers to achieving tenure and promotion compared to their male colleagues. Women professors also often leave their jobs at a much higher rate.
Finally, the Trump administration has pursued policies that make women less safe and more vulnerable to exploitation, reinforcing the power structures of male-dominated rule.
The Department of Justice, acting on recommendations from DOGE, cut grants to organizations that assist victims of domestic violence, of which roughly 85% are women. Impacted organizations include the National Criminal Justice Association, the National Association for Victims of Crime, and the National Crime Victim Law Institute.
The Trump administration limited grants distributed by the Office on Violence Against Women, requiring organizations to abide by anti-DEI and anti-immigrant conditions that prevent outreach to the most vulnerable communities.
All of the grants updated last week included new restrictions on spending grant money on “promoting or facilitating the violation of federal immigration law,” “inculcating or promoting gender ideology” or “promoting or facilitating discriminatory programs or ideology” [...] Grantees are not allowed to spend money on “activities that frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses.”
Separately, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal seeks to cut funding for the Office on Violence Against Women by 29%.
Under the proposal, one grant program that assists domestic violence and sexual assault survivors with transitional housing would see a 20 percent decrease in appropriated funding. A victim legal assistance program would see a 27 percent cut in appropriated funding.
One other program, the Sexual Assault Services Formula Grant Program, helps states support rape crisis centers and other groups that provide services to victims of sexual assault and their families. Under the proposal, it would be cut by 23 percent compared to current appropriated funding.
A separate program is related to strengthening law enforcement and prosecution strategies to fight violent crimes against women, along with developing victim services in those cases. It would see a 25 percent cut under the proposal, leaving it tens of millions of dollars short compared to the current appropriated funding level.
The Department of Defense paused its sexual assault prevention training program and is reportedly considering scrapping the effort entirely. The program provides military survivors of sexual assault with mental and physical health care services, advocacy services, and legal assistance; provides trainings on how to prevent sexual assault; and collects data on sexual violence within the military.
The Trump administration rescinded Biden’s Title IX rules on sexual harassment in universities and colleges, making it more difficult for victims to report sexual harassment and restricting schools from investigating incidents that occur off campus.
Trump’s policies effectively ending asylum stranded women fleeing gender-based violence in their home countries, where law enforcement often refuse to intervene and simply return women to their abusers.
The Department of Homeland Security rescinded its policy prohibiting ICE from raiding and detaining people in sensitive zones, which include women’s shelters.
An attack on women’s rights is an attack on all of our rights
Don't assume this doesn't affect you if you're not a woman. The GOP’s attempt to reimpose a white, male-dominated social order harms everyone. Men who reject rigid ideals of masculinity face the same hostility that women encounter when they defy traditional notions of femininity. Non-conforming cis-gender individuals are equally subject to the consequences of transphobic bigotry because you cannot police trans bodies without policing all bodies. Our rights are interconnected—when one group is targeted, everyone’s freedom is at risk.
Throughout history, authoritarian movements have relied on narrow gender roles to maintain control, punishing anyone who doesn’t conform. Today’s attacks on women’s rights, bodily autonomy, gender expression, and queer identity are part of that same authoritarian playbook.
If authoritarian leaders and their base frequently disparage and repress women, femme, and queer-led movements, it is because they too recognize the power of a pro-democracy feminist front in confronting and undermining their power.
I was told, and believed, that there were more women than men in the world especially in the United States.
If this is true, then why is a response to Trump's hatred towards women so wimpy?