Project 2025, Trump's Agenda, and Reproductive Rights

Project 2025, the playbook for Trump's second term agenda, reflects his goals to grow his base of fundamentalist evangelical Christians and to cement the authoritarian powers of the presidency. A recent CBS News Analysis revealed that 28 of the 38 primary authors of Project 2025 worked in Trump's administration and at least 270 of its policy proposals matched Trump's campaign proposals.

Since Project 2025 was unveiled to the public and staunchly ridiculed for its extremism at the Democratic Convention, Trump has vigorously denied knowing anything about it. Hhaving once been a prochoice Democrat, Trump is known to flip his beliefs for his political advantage. To please his Christian base, he filled the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court with anti-abortion judges, leading to the downfall of Roe with the Dobbs decision and the subsequent attempt of many state legislatures to attack women's reproductive rights.

Most women (and many men as well)  were not keen on dragging women back to Pre-Roe times, and they were "mad as hell." Women's bodily autonomy and reproductive health rights took center stage in mid-term 2022 elections, and they promise to play a huge role in 2024, especially now that the almost immediate effects of the Dobbs decision are known.

 According to recent data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), abortion is now banned outright in 14 states. Another six states have early gestational limits between 6 and 12 weeks, and five others, between 15 and 22 weeks. Only nine states and D.C. have no such limits.  While most states with bans contain exceptions to “prevent the death” or “preserve the life” of the woman, KFF warns that "it is not clear how much risk of death or how close to death a pregnant patient may need to be for the exception to apply and the determination is not explicitly up to the physician treating the pregnant patient."

 States are now divided into what KFF calls abortion "deserts" (mainly in the South and Midwest), where it is illegal to access care, and abortion "havens," where care is still available. Many of the millions of women who live in abortion deserts are forced to travel to receive legal care. Many of them are also poor, and their stories are grim. Girls as young as ten-years-old have been impregnated by rape and forced to travel up to 400 miles or more to get an abortion.

OBYGN doctors, nurses and midwives in states with bans or near bans are in danger of being sent to prison as they struggle to help patients with miscarriages, or pregnancies gone terribly wrong involving the woman's reproductive organs or the fetus's viability.  Many are leaving the practice, making their states even more of a healthcare desert.

 Since Dobbs, Republicans attempted to block Mifeprestone, a commonly used abortion pill. Failing at this in the Supreme Court, they are now working to block the mailing of the abortion pill and of all contraception medications, and to give "fetal personhood" to in vitro fertilized (IVF) eggs created for women having difficulties becoming pregnant.

 Meanwhile legislatures even in some red states have been introducing constitutional amendments to protect women's rights. In the November election it will be important to pay close attention to these amendments and vote up and down the ballot for Democrats who support reproductive healthcare.

Roger Severino, who served in then-President Trump's Health and Human Services Department, wrote the healthcare chapter of Project 2025. He proposed retitling that department the "Department of Life," for a Christian nationalist focus. It explicitly rejects that abortion is healthcare. Using the 1880s Comstock Act, it would ban abortion nationwide and jail healthcare providers who performed it. It would end federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides access to contraception for more than two million women annually. It would undo the Biden Administration rule that shields medical records related to abortion from criminal investigations of patients who cross state lines for an abortion. It would reverse the approval of mifepristone and make the mailing of abortion pills to patients illegal. It would allow employers to deny workers access to birth control coverage. It would roll back LGBTQ+rights.

 Trump is running scared. Not only did he lose Joe Biden as his "easy" opponent. Women's revolt after the Dobbs decision and its aftermath, and people's reaction to Project 2025 at the Democrat Convention are clearly upsetting. So he is in denial. We cannot trust him, a perpetual liar, about his claim that he would not call for a nationwide abortion ban.

 Before you vote in November, think long and hard about Trump's agenda.

Acknowledgement: This article first appeared in the Gettysburg Times on September 12, under the paper's revised title:  "Anti-Trump claims."