Coast Guard joins Navy in halting funding for abortion-related travel and leave

The United States Coast Guard has announced that it will no longer be funding abortion-related travel or leave, as the military looks to reverse a Biden-era policy requiring the Department of Defense (DOD) to pay for service members to have abortions. Just last week, the Navy made a similar announcement.

In 2022, the Pentagon said it would pay for service members’ abortion-related travel. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, along with pro-life laws in some states, would affect “readiness, recruiting, and retention implications” for the U.S. military. Therefore, service members and their defendants would be reimbursed for expenses incurred when seeking induced abortions to intentionally end the lives of their preborn children.

After President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time in January, he issued an executive order reinforcing the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal dollars from funding most abortions. As a result, the DOD released a memo confirming it would no longer fund abortion-related travel.

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Earlier in March, the Navy announced it would halt abortion-related leave and funding for abortion travel, following the DOD directive. Now, in a memo, the Coast Guard has also confirmed that abortion travel expenses will not be reimbursed, and Coast Guardsmen will not be granted administrative leave for abortion.

Still covered are fertility-related procedures, including egg retrieval, sperm donation, intrauterine insemination (IUI), and in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and current Secretary of Defense, had been a harsh critic of the Biden-era abortion policy.

“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,” he said, adding, “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.”