Project 2025: Reproductive Rights
The Heritage Foundation would rather have you die in childbirth than provide you with life-saving reproductive health care.
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It’s difficult to know where to begin when trying to deconstruct the views on reproductive health that are expressed in Project 2025. Virtually everything that’s expressed about the subject is based on a narrow theocratic set of beliefs — beliefs that are in the distinct minority in the United States, even among people of faith. Project 2025 presupposes that there should be no abortion under any circumstances, and it goes downhill from there.
The subject of abortion gets pounced on early in the document:
“[C]onservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.” [Emphasis added.]
- Project 2025, p. 6
And “downhill from there” includes:
Banning federal funding for all abortions, including those that would save the life of the mother.
“Since 1977, the Hyde Amendment has banned the use of any federal funds for abortion, only allowing exceptions to pay for terminating pregnancies that endanger the life of the pregnant person or that result from rape or incest.” (Kaiser Family Foundation). The Heritage Foundation would prefer for a pregnant mother die in childbirth for a non-viable pregnancy rather than have the federal government spend a single cent to attempt to save the mother’s life.Banning medication abortion, the statistically safest abortion method.
According to The Heritage Foundation, the FDA should reverse its approval of mifepristone. Without citation, Project 2025 cites 26 deaths of pregnant mothers in the more than 23 years since mifepristone was approved by the FDA. This rhetoric is typical of the anti-abortion zealots. Of course, 26 deaths (if that number is even accurate) is tragic. But they provide no specifics as to the circumstances of those deaths (i.e., whether those deaths are directly attributable to mifepristone or instead whether there were other complications of pregnancy). Compare that number of deaths with the number of deaths from aspirin, which is around 3,000 annually. Yet I don’t hear any outcry from anyone that FDA approval of aspirin should be rescinded.Banning the sale of abortion-inducing drugs across state lines. To implement their complete anti-abortion agenda, Project 2025 describes preventing often life-saving medication from being shipped to the places where that medication is needed. They celebrate the fact that individual states can ban individual medications, but they want federal legislation to prevent the distribution of those medications. The Heritage Foundation wants states rights when it suits their agenda but it also wants federalism when it’s convenient. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
Making sure that medical schools do not train doctors and nurses how to perform abortions. (Project 2025, p. 485) Not only do these folks want to make unilateral decision about your reproductive care, without even taking specific circumstances into consideration, they also want to make unilateral decisions about what can be taught in the nation’s medical schools, making abortions less safe and virtually guaranteeing the deaths of some women seeking abortions from so-called “back-alley” abortion providers.
But there’s more:
From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.
— Project 2025, p. 450
The Heritage Foundation shamelessly wants to have a say in (and, in many cases, control of) every aspect of your life, from conception to death. They’re basically saying that their own judgment (grounded in their extreme right-wing religion) is better than your judgment about how you should live your life. Could anything be more theocratic?
The IVF Conundrum
Notable for its absence in Project 2025 is any mention of IVF (in vitro fertilization). There are a couple of reasons for this.
Project 2025 does state unequivocally that The Heritage Foundation vehemently opposes “embryo-destructive” research, primarily because it considers an embryo as a human life. But the issue of IVF really became a hot button issue after Project 2025 had already been published and, more importantly, after the Alabama Supreme Court declared that ruled that embryos were children.
That ruling left Heritage and Republican politicians in an extremely awkward position. There was much public flailing and flopping about because, on the one hand, they staunchly defended the position that embryos should never be used in medical research because they represented human life. On the other hand, thousands of their own constituents and supporters received IVF every year, despite the fact that, for each child born resulting from IVF, many embryos were destroyed.
The right-wing obsession with making more babies (specifically white babies) completely butted heads with their obsessive belief that embryos were human life. What to do? What to do?
The discussion reached peak idiocy when Donald Trump, never one to miss an opportunity to be opportunistic, plowed his way into the discussion in late August in an interview with NBC News. He vowed that not only was he a champion of IVF (180° away from his previous position) but also that, if elected, he would make sure the government would pay for IVF for anyone that wanted it or he would somehow force insurance companies to pay for it.
The IVF issue is just one example of how the policies described in Project 2025, when taken to their logical inevitable conclusions, are utterly impractical, structurally hypocritical, and completely out of step with the views of the majority of Americans.