[Editor’s note: Jayne Flores submitted her opinion to Kandit’s question, “What are you most hopeful and most fearful about in the second Trump administration?”]
By Jayne Flores for Kandit News & Views
As Bureau of Women’s Affairs Director, I have to be honest and say that I have more fears than hopes for when President Donald Trump takes his oath of office for the second time on January 20, 2025.
One major fear is that the status of women’s healthcare in our country will deteriorate even further under Trump 2.0. It never dawned on me that my daughters would have less rights over their own bodies than I had as a young woman, but here we are. During the campaign President Trump bragged about how he was able to overturn Roe v. Wade through his appointment of three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court then promptly eliminated the legal right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy in our country, a right women have held for nearly 50 years.
This decision has resulted in some rabid anti-abortion legislation in states around the country. Because of these laws, we are now seeing doctors afraid to treat women even for miscarriages, or “spontaneous abortions” as they are called medically. The March of Dimes reports that “between 10 to 20 in 100 known pregnancies (10 to 20 percent) end in miscarriage.” I myself had two miscarriages, and three healthy pregnancies in between them.
We are starting to see women die because doctors are afraid to treat a miscarriage even if the woman is bleeding out. The American Academy of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on Oct. 3rd released a statement saying, in part:
“There is no doubt that abortion bans are preventing ob-gyns and other clinicians from providing health care to their patients, and that those patients and their families are suffering as a result. We know this from the heart-wrenching personal accounts shared over the last two years that show doctors and patients alike forced into impossible situations that risked their lives, health, freedom, and livelihoods… People driven by ideology who worked tirelessly to put these anti-abortion laws in place are blaming everyone but themselves for the mounting harms these abortion bans are causing.”
The AAOG statement also addressed the misinformation surrounding this issue:
“ACOG unequivocally condemns the misrepresentation and exploitation of the medical emergencies, complications, and deaths of pregnant people by groups aiming to advance their harmful anti-abortion political agenda… This latest misinformation campaign proves once again that anti-abortion activists are willing to see people suffer and die to prevent access to abortion care and miscarriage management.”
This leads to my greatest fear about Trump 2.0: false information.
President Trump has made false information acceptable in America. Facts and scientific evidence don’t seem to matter anymore. People believe what they want to believe. During the campaign, Trump and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance repeated the ridiculous lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs. Springfield officials had to go on national media and state that the claim was not true. No matter to Trump and Vance – they still repeated it.
Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for Adolf Hitler, is credited with the famous statement that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. This seems to be Trump’s mantra as well.
We saw a minute version of this philosophy recently when the Legislature declined to fund the BWA Guahan Doula Project because anti-abortion advocates told senators that this project was promoting abortion. Which is completely untrue. Yet because senators received nearly 700 form letters from people who believed this false information, they killed the funding for this very worthwhile project to help women have healthier pregnancies and healthier babies.
People no longer care about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of an issue. And fewer news organizations are actually reporting this information. People turn to social media or a podcast, rather than actual journalists who seek truth and report it.
This is my greatest fear, and I think the greatest disservice that President Trump has done to America. He’s literally dumbing us down before our very eyes.
I do have some hope through a few of Trump’s cabinet picks who seem qualified, like Scott Bessent for Treasury Secretary. It is my hope that Mr. Bessent and people like him will use facts and research to convince President Trump to actually improve the lives of all Americans and unite, rather than divide us.
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Jayne Flores is the director of the Bureau of Women’s Affairs. She spent the majority of her career as a journalist.
