Written by Zane McNeill, Civil Rights & Health Equity Legal Fellow
Since beginning his second presidential term, Donald Trump has made restricting healthcare access and civil rights a defining feature of his administration.
Research shows that authoritarians often manufacture and weaponize moral panics around gender and sexuality to weaken democratic institutions. By targeting marginalized groups, they erode the civil rights protections that safeguard all citizens and consolidate political power. Controlling people’s bodies becomes a means of controlling populations, suppressing dissent, and maintaining social and political dominance. Through this lens we can determine that the Trump administration’s efforts to limit reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality are not isolated policy choices but part of a broader authoritarian playbook.
In Poland, for instance, the Law and Justice (PiS) party–described by scholar Julia Palejko as responsible for Europe’s “fastest backsliding democracy”–has severely restricted abortion access and created what Palejko calls a “gendered regime, which prevents women from exercising full civil rights.” By curbing reproductive freedoms, the PiS has centralized state control, reinforced traditional gender roles, mobilized conservative and religious support, and distracted from its broader dismantling of democratic institutions. At the same time, the party has made opposition to so-called “LGBT ideology” central to its political messaging.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom Trump has praised as “a very great leader, a very strong man,” has similarly weaponized anxieties around gender relations to consolidate power. Like Poland, Hungary has simultaneously restricted access to abortion and contraception while exploiting and amplifying public fears about the erosion of “traditional family values.” The government has ended the legal recognition of transgender people, banned same-sex adoption, and passed constitutional amendments to ban public LGBTQ events, such as Pride, and expand the country’s surveillance apparatus.
Both Hungary and Poland used these gender issues as a political tool to gain power, only to later use that power to undermine judicial independence. In Poland, the PiS introduced legislation that compelled judges to retire early and filled judicial bodies with party loyalists, weakening the authority of the Supreme Court. In a similar fashion, Hungary’s government restructured its courts by appointing loyal judges, cutting judicial salaries, and curbing judges’ ability to speak freely.
These tactics have increasingly influenced the American right. For instance, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has hosted events in both Hungary and Poland, while Hungary has established think tanks such as the Danube Institute and the Center for Fundamental Rights (CFR) to promote its model of “illiberal democracy” abroad. Notably, the Danube Institute has a formal collaboration with the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind the notorious conservative blueprint Project 2025, which was drafted after Heritage staff studied Hungary’s policies firsthand.
Less than a year into Trump’s second term, Project 2025 is already nearly 50 percent complete, and many of its proposals directly target reproductive and LGBTQ rights. As part of its implementation, the Trump administration initiated a “review” of mifepristone–an extremely safe and widely used abortion medication, at the urging of anti-abortion groups and lawmakers. Advocates say that this is part of a broader plan to restrict and eventually eliminate access to medication abortion altogether. The administration has also rescinded Biden-era guidance protecting emergency abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) and targeted funding for reproductive healthcare. The Trump administration seems to also be considering targeting contraception, allowing 9.7 million worth of contraception meant to be delivered in foreign aid to sit in warehouses, incorrectly labeling the contraceptives “abortifacients.”
Simultaneously, Trump has aggressively targeted transgender communities, signing multiple executive orders that have removed civil rights protections from trans people and severely restricted transgender youth’s access to gender-affirming care. These orders prompted the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to publish a widely criticized review of gender-affirming care, which the government has used as pretext to investigate clinics and justify the withdrawal of federal funding from hospitals providing such care.
Hungary and Poland offer a warning: when governments gain the power to control people’s bodies, they rarely stop there. By relying on anti-gender politics to mobilize his base, Trump has built on his first-term success of reshaping the Supreme Court, using it to further consolidate power in his second term. He has also expanded his control over regulatory agencies to target federal judges and law firms, and weaponized the Department of Justice (DOJ) to target his political and ideological opponents. This is a critical moment for the judiciary and the legal profession to defend democracy and protect bodily autonomy.
By attacking reproductive and LGBTQ rights, the Trump administration is following the authoritarian blueprint–using control over people’s bodies as a means to erode democracy. But these countries also show what resistance can achieve. In Poland, judicial activism to defend court independence became a key barrier against democratic backsliding. Judges called for mass protests, engaged in civil disobedience, and helped pave the way for the PiS party’s defeat in the 2023 parliamentary elections. In sum, an estimated one-third of Polish judges took public action despite facing suspensions, salary cuts, and investigations. Likewise, attorneys and judges in the United States must push back. The lesson from Poland is that you don't need everyone to be brave, but you do need the infrastructure that makes bravery possible and the coalitions that ensure brave actors aren't isolated.
