The District of Columbia has some of the nation’s most liberal abortion laws. One of eight jurisdictions with no limits on gestational age, it’s a travel destination not just for people from states with abortion bans, but for residents of blue states where procedures for abortions later in pregnancy can still be hard to access.
With an election looming, activists and providers worry that this could soon change: Under the strange rules governing the capital, Congress can simply ignore the locals and enact municipal laws, meaning a Republican trifecta could quickly lead to a D.C. ban. That’s what some anti-abortion organizations are calling for. And while Donald Trump now says the issue should be up to states, the nation’s capital isn’t a state. Trump’s own GOP platform vows to “reassert greater Federal Control over Washington, D.C.”
“People don’t realize how tenuous access is in D.C.,” said Alisha Dingus of the D.C. Abortion Fund, which raises money to pay for abortions for low-income patients — up to 40 percent of whom, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, have come from outside the region.
But in a sign of Trump’s desperation to avoid the perilous politics of abortion, those concerns are being pooh-poohed by the ex-president.
Though Republican lawmakers spent years targeting abortion in D.C., and though Trump recently vowed to strip power from the deep-blue city’s elected government, his campaign told me — amazingly — that the District has the right to make its own rules about abortion.
“Democrats want to gaslight Americans and sow fear, but President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states, and the District of Columbia, to make decisions on abortion,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The “and the District of Columbia” part of that sentence marks a jaw-dropping departure from decades of GOP orthodoxy.
In Congress, GOP majorities have intervened to stop the locals from voting to legalize marijuana, administer a needle-exchange program, allow noncitizens to vote in city elections, update the municipal criminal code, and use hometown tax dollars to pay for low-income abortion care. The Project 2025 blueprint calls for prohibiting D.C.’s public schools from teaching critical race theory. There are ongoing Congressional efforts to do away with physician-assisted suicide and permit concealed carry in the city.
“We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation,” Trump himself said at a Florida rally this summer. “We’re going to take it away from the mayor. And again, that doesn’t make me popular there, but I have to say it.”
As an indication of just how far into the civic weeds Republicans are willing to go, a few weeks ago, I wrote about recent GOP-led efforts — approved by the House of Representatives — to nitpick wonky municipal traffic regulations about whether or not drivers can make right turns at red lights.
So after all that monkeying around with city-council arcana, the local government’s views on abortion rights are suddenly sacrosanct?
There is, of course, a giant loophole in the campaign’s statement: By many Republican pols’ reading of the law, Congress is the local government. All the same, if a GOP candidate is even bothering to make nice noises about respecting residents’ opinions, you can bet it has a lot more to do with navigating national politics than with honoring one comparatively puny city’s electorate.
Just as Trump’s recent abortion positioning has been met by mostly muted grumbling from anti-abortion ultras, the Hill’s most energetic D.C.-bashers seem to be holding fire, too.
Requests for comment this week went unanswered by some of the GOP’s top antagonists of both abortion rights and D.C. self-government: Florida Rep. Kat Cammack, a co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus; Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, a fellow co-chair who for years has successfully worked to stop D.C. from legalizing cannabis sales; Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, who has floated a D.C. abortion ban; Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, both of whom introduced legislation to end home rule in the capital.
Given the impending presidential election, it’s no surprise if elected officials want to leave the sound bites to full-time advocates.
“Washington D.C., along with seven states, allows abortion for any reason at any point with no gestational limits,” said Jamie Dangers, federal affairs director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “Children, no matter their location, deserve to be protected under the law. This includes D.C.”
“Congress has every right to protect life and to be concerned about mothers and their children,” said Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media & policy at Students for Life Action. “The fact that our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, is actively engaging in barbaric late-term abortion should cause embarrassment, not celebration. It is a moral evil that children are slaughtered in the capital of the free world and never given the chance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.”
On the other side, meanwhile, there’s not a lot of faith that Trump will stick to his apparent support for local decision-making.
“We’ve seen the Republicans shift their language on this because they know it’s not popular,” said Dingus, whose organization’s mission of underwriting abortions for needy people is only necessary because Congress has forbidden the city from using local tax dollars. “When they talk about, ‘Oh we’re going to have a compromise,’ we know what that means: They will ban abortion. They’re going to keep shifting their language going up to the election so we won’t look at what they’ve done already.”
Even if you take Trump at his word about Washington determining its own abortion laws — which Dingus most emphatically does not — he would still take office closely allied with pols determined to end the practice. And he wouldn’t be the first president to simply trade away the prerogatives of the politically marooned capital, either. In 2011, no less a home-rule ally than Barack Obama accepted the GOP rider prohibiting D.C. taxpayer-funded abortions as part of budget negotiations with new Republican House Speaker John Boehner.
“John, I’ll give you D.C. abortion,” Obama was quoted as saying during the talks. Under the law, it was his to give.
“It is definitely a legitimate concern, and it’s one that residents of the District have had for decades,” said Jamila Perritt, a Washington OB-GYN and the president of Physicians for Reproductive Health. “It’s not a new issue for us. We find ourselves frequently at the will of Congress in terms of our ability to make autonomous decisions.” Perritt recalled having to phone patients after the Obama-Boehner bargain to tell them that their procedures would no longer be covered.
It’s pretty easy to picture a future deal that again cuts the locals out of the lawmaking. Washington’s rules on abortions later in pregnancy would make an easy GOP target. “We have people flying from California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, all the states that are the safe haven abortion states,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, a D.C.-based activist whose organization, We Testify, focuses on sharing abortion stories. “I feel like they will look at that and want to stop it.”
Indeed, it’s no surprise that both of the anti-abortion groups who responded to my queries about D.C.-specific bans talked about late-stage abortions, which comprise a small fraction of all abortions. So did the statement from Leavitt, the Trump spokeswoman, who went on to say that “Kamala Harris and the Democrats are radically out of touch with the majority of Americans in their support for abortion up until birth and even after birth, and forcing taxpayers to fund it.”
But with the end of Roe, the stakes for what can be bargained have grown dramatically.
None of the advocates I spoke to argued that the federal government lacks the right to outlaw abortion in D.C. Even under the current home rule laws, Congress retains the power to pass local legislation. The job of local DA is handled by the U.S. Attorney, appointed by the White House, not the voters of the District. The president is also empowered to take over control of local police. So if a D.C. ban got held up by a filibuster, a determined chief executive could probably use local law enforcement and creative legal interpretations to severely curtail the procedure.
If that were to happen, it would be the relatively rare case where federal interference affected the lives of federal Washington’s political-class swells along with hometown D.C.’s non-VIPs.
So many of the familiar high-profile clashes between Capitol Hill and City Hall involve programs for folks who are underrepresented in Congressional offices, lobbying firms or major-media newsrooms: Medicaid recipients who can’t afford abortions, down-and-out IV drug addicts who might resort to dirty needles, low-income families seeking private-school vouchers.
But abortion rights impact a much larger share of the population — something that’s true even in a jurisdiction where everyone is just a short Metro from states that don’t have bans.
As residents of states with post-Dobbs restrictions have learned, outlawing the procedure has all sorts of knock-on effects for people who didn’t have any plans to visit an abortion clinic. Hospitals have a harder time recruiting physicians for high-quality childbirth programs; pregnant women undergoing emergencies find themselves at risk because doctors are afraid of being prosecuted for necessary interventions. A Gallup survey this spring revealed that abortion laws were affecting decisions on where to go to college, something that might be a big deal in a city that is betting its economic future on growing the student population.
Depending on what a hypothetical D.C.-only ban required, the capital’s proximity could also complicate things in the blue suburbs that aren’t under Congressional supervision, said Nisha Verma, a physician and fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Many doctors in the region maintain medical licenses in all three jurisdictions. But some of the abortion regimes in restrictive states place local doctors’ medical licenses at risk even if they perform the procedure elsewhere — a rule that, if imposed on D.C., could cause physicians to drop the practice even in Maryland or Virginia.
“This will impact everyone,” said Dingus, of the D.C. Abortion Fund. “It doesn’t matter how much money you make, it doesn’t matter how good your insurance is. If providers go away and clinics close, it’s not good.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misspelled Nisha Verma’s name.
