Whitney Hermandorfer was the first Trump nominee to the federal judiciary to be confirmed in his second term. Like several others, she has an anti-abortion history.Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Zuma
During his campaign for a second term in office, President Donald Trump claimed that he would leave abortion “to the states” if re-elected.
Trump has, in fact, managed to quietly shape the national abortion politics in his second term. According to a new analysis from the Associated Press (AP), roughly half of Trump’s nominees to the federal judiciary thus far have records of being openly anti-abortion or associating with anti-abortion groups.
This is not entirely surprising for anyone who has been paying attention. As my colleague Madison Pauly outlined back in January, packing the federal courts with anti-abortion judges is one of the many insidious measures that reproductive rights advocates warned Trump could take to restrict access to abortion nationwide. But the new analysis from AP reveals the greatest detail to date about the extent of these nominees’ opposition to abortion.
In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, called on senators “to defend their constituents’ rights and health care by voting no on the remaining and future anti-abortion nominees.” (Five of Trump’s nominees, including two who the AP found have openly anti-abortion hsitories, have already been confirmed by the Senate.)
At least eight of the 17 nominees Trump has named so far have argued in favor of abortion restrictions or against expanding access, the AP reports.
These nominees include Whitney Hermandorfer, who defended Tennessee’s abortion ban as an attorney representing the state attorney general’s office last year; Jordan Pratt, who argued in support of Florida’s 15-week abortion ban back in 2023, when he was an attorney for the First Liberty Institute, a right-wing Christian legal group; John Guard, who defended the same Florida law as the state’s chief deputy attorney general; and Bill Mercer, a GOP state lawmaker in Montana, who has voted for a variety of anti-abortion bills.
Several of the nominees have also explicitly sought to restrict access to abortion pills, even though more than 100 scientific studies have proven they are safe and effective. Maria Lanahan, who is awaiting confirmation, and Joshua Divine, who has already been sworn in, both, while working in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, co-authored state’s complaint when it intervened in joining a then-pending lawsuit before the Supreme Court asking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to rescind its approval of abortion pills.
It may be tempting to dismiss these nominees as a small handful of anti-abortion zealots who appear to share the anti-abortion politics of many others in the Trump administration. But as I previously wrote, nominees who secure one of these lifetime appointments wield immense power:
The significance of these lifetime appointments for the future of reproductive rights becomes apparent when you consider Matthew Kacsmaryk. He’s a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas who issued an anti-science ruling [in 2023] that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring a case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.
[In 2024], the Supreme Court sent the case on emergency abortion care back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—a federal court in California with 10 Trump-appointed judges and jurisdiction over more than a dozen district courts in nine states.
As David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University whose scholarly work focuses on abortion access, told me when I wrote that piece last year: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense, because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”
Reproductive rights advocates said that the nominees’ anti-abortion politics are both unsurprising and deserving of urgent opposition.
“It’s no surprise that Trump is not only continuing to nominate more anti-abortion, anti-democracy extremists, as he did in his first term, but is also ignoring his promise to ‘leave it to the states,’ while lying about a half-baked plan to pay for IVF procedures, a major campaign promise, which has been proven to be nothing more than a hoax to curry favor with single-issue voters,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.
“These nominees have, and will always be, about who will remain loyal to Trump while advancing his agenda to ban abortion nationwide,” Timmaraju added.