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Reproductive Rights Explainers
Gutting Abortion Access Under Project 2025
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Reproductive Freedom for All
RE: Gutting Abortion Access Under Project 2025
DATE: July 17, 2024
Project 2025 is a 900-page conservative policy agenda designed to be Trump’s blueprint to decimate our fundamental rights and democracy that he could begin launching on Day One should he win the election.
Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, an extremist organization that is also the RNC’s largest funder, the document was drafted by countless members of Trump’s administration. It includes alarming changes in the federal government, including altering personnel rules to ensure government workers are more loyal to the president.
The extensive mandate calls to gut reproductive freedom, including effectively banning medication abortion, ending access to emergency abortion care, attacking contraception, deploying fetal personhood, and undermining IVF in federal policy. From deleting the word “abortion” from every “federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” to funding fake health centers, to inserting anti-abortion disinformation into federal health, the list of ways abortion extremists will strip away our reproductive freedoms continues to grow.
Trump’s work to end access to abortion, undermine reproductive freedom, and enable abortion extremists is undeniable—and if he is elected this November, he’ll immediately get to work further decimating our rights.
The Authors and Advisors
At least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in crafting Project 2025, and 31 of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing it were directly connected to the Trump administration. While Trump has tried to pretend he has “no idea” who is behind it, nothing could be further from the truth.
Perhaps most alarmingly for reproductive freedom, Roger Severino—who played a key role in blocking reproductive freedom as director of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights during the Trump administration—wrote the Project 2025 chapter outlining ways for that agency to further decimate abortion rights and access.
Some other Trump administration officials who authored components of the blueprint or advised on it include:
- Ben Carson, who served as the head of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development
- Ken Cuccinelli, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security,
- Paul Dan, Chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump,
- Anti-abortion groups—the same organizations who worked alongside Trump to block abortion rights and access during and after his presidency through litigation and regulatory challenges:
- American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs
- Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America
- Americans United for Life, Students for Life
- Concerned Women for America
- Alliance Defending Freedom — the legal group that helped Trump end Roe v. Wade and argued the two abortion cases heard by the Supreme Court this term involving access to medication abortion and emergency abortion care.
The Plan:
The key abortion and reproductive health care proposals in Project 2025 include:
- Contraception: Project 2025 includes personhood language and policies that propagate the belief that life begins at conception—which could have devastating impacts should it be put into law. This so-called “personhood” language could ban not only abortion but also some forms of birth control and assisted fertility treatments like IVF.
- Blocking Access to Abortion Through Comstock: The plan willfully misinterprets and misuses the antiquated Comstock Act to block access to both abortion pills and medical equipment used for abortion care. This would effectively ban abortion in all 50 states—with or without the support of Congress and the courts.
- Emergency Abortion Care: Calls for the administration to stop enforcing a federal law requiring that hospitals provide emergency care to pregnant people who need an abortion. This would force countless more people to endure the tragic and life-threatening situations we’ve already heard so many horror stories about.
- Privacy: Tracking pregnancy outcomes—including abortion—across the country.
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