The Department of the Navy announced last week that it is no longer offering paid leave or travel reimbursements for service members to get abortions.
The new Navy policy states that “taxpayer dollars will not be used to fund, promote, or reimburse Service Members of dependents for elective abortion-related travel expenses.” Other services, including travel for “ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval, sperm collection and processing, intrauterine insemination, and in vitro fertilization,” will continue to be covered.
In October 2022, then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that the Pentagon would be paying travel expenses for military members and their dependents to get abortions. The move was seen as an attempt by the Biden administration to further expand abortion and circumvent the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal dollars from funding most abortions in the U.S.
Following his election in January, President Trump took steps to reverse the previous administration’s radical abortion stance, including issuing an executive order undoing Biden’s efforts to sidestep Hyde. As a result of Trump’s order, the Department of Defense announced in a memo that “it had officially struck the Biden-era abortion-related travel allowances, “[i]n accordance with Executive Order, Enforcing the Hyde Amendment, January 24, 2025….”
Austin’s successor as Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had previously blasted the Biden administration’s military abortion policy. In his book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” he wrote:
When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in the summer of 2022, the Biden administration frothed into a panic and took steps to work around the near forty-year moratorium on government-funded abortions at both the VA and the Department of Defense. […] The VA contends that female veterans with PTSD are more likely to have issue or complex pregnancies, higher rates of gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia. So you are probably better off just, you know, aborting them.
In January, Senator Tommy Tuberville praised the news that the Department of Defense would no longer be funding abortions.
“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth affirmed today what I’ve been fighting for since I got to Washington: zero taxpayer dollars should go towards abortions,” he said. “Under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s leadership, the Pentagon will once again be focused on lethality, not pushing a political agenda.”
