No election in recent memory has posed more of a threat to women if conservatives are elected as this one. The freedom to make our own decisions about if or when we want to bear children, choose how we prevent pregnancy, and define our families are in peril. Even our right to receive quality, life-saving obstetric care is at stake. This isn’t hyperbole. If the authors of Project 2025 get their way, it’s the future.
What is Project 2025?
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project was launched in 2022 by The Heritage Foundation. Its ultraconservative 900-page playbook, A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, known as Project 2025, documents the goals it hopes to achieve once Trump or other conservative is elected President.
Anti-worker, anti-government, and anti-diversity, it seeks to undo the progress of the civil rights movement and strip protections for women, communities of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Its policies consolidate the entire government—all three branches—under control of the President, granting him unprecedented power.
Project 2025 is also an unbridled assault on every woman’s autonomy.
At the heart of Project 2025 is its promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Not surprisingly, its view is that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” (p. 489) Single-parent, same-sex, and other nontraditional families are vilified, and Project 2025’s definition of what constitutes a family underpins every policy they propose.
As early as page 4, the conservative manifesto calls for the removal of all language about gender equality and equity, abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive rights from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.” (p. 5) They believe such language encourages abortion on demand.
Quiet, ladies. The men are speaking.
Abortion and family planning take up a lot of real estate in Project 2025, though 31 of its 38 authors and editors are men. They may not know that ectopic pregnancies are life-threatening and 100% unviable. They may not comprehend how traumatic carrying your rapist’s or father’s baby to term can be. They might not care about a 20-year-old woman who must abandon her dreams of college, career, or financial independence due to an unintended pregnancy. They may not even understand how all the lady parts work. But they have plenty to say about our bodies.
Here are their proposals for women’s reproductive health.
– Ban abortion pills. “The abortion pill” is a common way to reference two medications used to terminate pregnancy, mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone is also used in managing missed or incomplete miscarriages. Project 2025 would ban the abortion pill and prosecute people who send them through the mail.
– Create abortion and miscarriage surveillance. And I quote: “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” (p. 455) One shudders to think if this data will be used to restrict the interstate travel of women of childbearing age.
– Ban the “morning-after pill,” also known as Plan B. Plan B works by delaying ovulation, not by medically inducing abortion, but the authors of Project 2025 call it an abortifacient. (Maybe they don’t understand what ovulation is because they are not a gynecologically savvy bunch.) Plan B is a key component of post-rape treatment in the emergency room.
– Allow faith-based employers to deny workers birth control coverage.
– Defund Planned Parenthood, which, in addition to abortion procedures, provides contraception, sexual health exams, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings, and general healthcare to millions of women.
– Eliminate abortion protections that exist in the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). Currently, federal protection exists through the EMTALA to ensure an abortion is legal when needed to address an emergency medical condition threatening a pregnant patient’s health or life. Project 2025 wants to do away with that protection and leave it up to states to decide.
– Prevent VA hospitals from offering abortions, a slap in the face to every woman serving her country.
– Force traumatized minors to give birth. Unaccompanied pregnant girls in the Office of Refugee Resettlement would be denied abortion access.
Current abortion bans are already hurting women.
Since the Dobbs decision, at least 14 states have imposed strict abortion bans. Women are suffering. Amanda Zurawski almost died when doctors at a Texas hospital decided she was not sick enough to qualify for an abortion. Kaitlyn Joshua of Louisiana was turned away by two hospitals as she was bleeding profusely while miscarrying. Samantha Casiano was forced to carry her baby to term even though it was diagnosed with anencephaly, an always fatal condition, during her 20-week ultrasound.
If Project 2025’s policies are enacted in a new Trump administration, we can expect more heartache, death, needless infertility, plus the self-induced and “back-alley abortions” that devastated countless women before Roe.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and soften his rhetoric on abortion, but don’t be fooled.
While he’s recently tried to disavow himself from Project 2025, 140 people from Trump’s administration served as its authors, editors, and advisors. Its main architect, Kevin Roberts, even has a follow-up book due to be published after the election called Dawn’s Early Light. (The subtitle of the book was originally, “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” but has since been changed because the word “burning” was too scary.) Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the foreword.
Writes Vance:
“Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”
All of their rhetoric and policy changes point to their core belief: A woman’s prime function is childbearing, and her place is at home where she’s pregnant or raising children, economically dependent, and locked into a “sacred” marriage, even one that is corrosive or abusive. To paraphrase Vance, women who haven’t borne children don’t have a stake in this country.
We must reject Project 2025 in numbers too big to ignore.
The authors of Project 2025 are engaged in a full-blown assault on the bodily autonomy, health, and future of women. It’s time to tell them that no means no. The day to do it is November 5, 2024. We must vote like our lives depend on it. They do.
This article was originally published at the human i™ newsletter, and is republished here with permission. It is one of a series of articles explaining Project 2025.
