Women in Colorado protest a speech by Mike Pence, June 2017.

Trump is expected to announce today that any medical facility that so much as refers a woman to an abortion clinic will lose federal family planning funds.

The rule, which is to be announced Friday, is a top priority of social conservatives and is the latest move by President Trump to impose curbs on abortion rights, in this case by withholding money from any facility or program that promotes abortion or refers patients to a caregiver that will provide one.

The policy would be a return to one instituted in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan that required abortion services to have a “physical separation” and “separate personnel” from other family planning activities. That policy is often described as a domestic gag rule because it barred caregivers at facilities that received family planning funds from providing any information to patients about an abortion or where to receive one.

Of course, it would be a known sexual predator; a man facing multiple, and credible, accusations of sexual assault; a man who has been rampantly promiscuous for years without apparently caring if the women he impregnated terminated the pregnancies or not, would be the one who comes up with something like this. It’s a pattern.

Mr. Trump is set next week to give the keynote speech at the “Campaign for Life” gala held by the Susan B. Anthony List. Ms. Dannenfelser has called Mr. Trump “the most pro-life president in our nation’s history.”

More proof that the entire anti-abortion movement is one big amoral cesspool. They don’t care about babies. They don’t care about women. They just care about control. But this is even worse:

Women in an exodus from Central America since 2014 have succeeded in winning asylum or other protections in the United States as victims of a pandemic of domestic abuse in that region. Because of recent cases that established fear of domestic violence as a legitimate basis for asylum, those claims often found more solid legal grounding in U.S. immigration court than claims of people who said they were escaping from killer gangs.

Now the Trump administration, determined to stop the stream of people to the border from Central America, is moving to curtail or close the legal avenues to protection for abused women like L.C. While the #MeToo movement has swept the country, bringing new legitimacy to women’s stories and consequences for men who abused, on immigration President Donald Trump is going the other way.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, from his position as the top official in charge of the immigration courts, is leading a broad review to question whether domestic or sexual violence should ever be recognized as persecution that would justify protection in the United States.

Yes, they’re all so pro-life they’re sending these women and girls back to near certain death rather than grant them asylum, because you know women and girls who are literally running for their lives must also be drug dealers and rapists.

Here is L.C.’s tale:

A woman from Honduras, who shall be identified only by her initials, L.C., was granted asylum in an immigration court in Chicago early this year. She came to the United States with her teenage daughter, fording the Rio Grande in Texas, after the girl had the extremely bad fortune of being a passer-by witness to a noonday massacre on a street near their home. Gunmen from the Mara 18 gang murdered eight people, mostly bus dispatchers, because the bus company was balking at paying a tax to the gang.

Soon the killers came to L.C.’s house, threatening to abduct her daughter for the sex trade and demanding that L.C. pay the gang for her child to be spared.

But that story of fear was not what convinced the immigration judge that L.C. had met the legal standard for asylum. Rather, it was her account of 16 years of beatings and sexual assault by her husband. In one of the last episodes before she fled, he had pressed a pistol to her temple to show how easy it would be to kill her.

Here’s more about our family-friendly, pro-life government: It was reported nearly a month ago that hundreds of immigrant children had been taken from their parents at the border.

On Feb. 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month-old son. They had fled their home in Honduras through a cloud of tear gas, she told border agents, and needed protection from the political violence there.

She had hoped she and her son would find refuge together. Instead, the agents ordered her to place her son in the back seat of a government vehicle, she said later in a sworn declaration to a federal court. They both cried as the boy was driven away.

For months, members of Congress have been demanding answers about how many families are being separated as they are processed at stations along the southwest border, in part because the Trump administration has in the past said it was considering taking children from their parents as a way to deter migrants from coming here.

…new data reviewed by The New York Times shows that more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October, including more than 100 children under the age of 4.

This week the Trump Administration declared it was going ahead with this plan, which is what they’ve been doing for months, anyway. The Department of Health and Human Services is inspecting military installations in Texas and Arkansas to be sure they are suitable for children. This no doubt has thrilled the Defense Department, which normally doesn’t sign on to be baby sitters.

Jeffie Sessions is in on this as well. This is from last month:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the Justice Department will begin prosecuting every person who illegally crosses into the United States along the Southwest border,a hard-line policy shift focusing in particular on migrants traveling with children.

Apparently, it’s families or single women traveling with children that do all the damage. Single men are less threatening, at least to Jeffie Sessions.

In separate speeches — one in Scottsdale, Ariz., the other in San Diego — Sessions said the Department of Homeland Security will begin referring such cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. Federal prosecutors will “take on as many of those cases as humanly possible until we get to 100 percent,” he said.

“If you cross the border unlawfully . . . then we will prosecute you,” Sessions said. “If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we’ll prosecute you. . . . If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”

This no doubt results in long-standing trauma to these children, to which the Trump Administration is oblivious. These are sick, twisted people. And so is Mike Pence. Pence keeps his head down and out of the headlines, but if anyone in the Trump Administration is playing the role of Aunt Lydia, it’s Pence. So I don’t want to leave him out.

Someday someone will make films about the atrocities committed by the Trump Administration while citizens looked on.  We’ve got to get these people out of office asap.