What Project 2025 Would Mean For Abortion
Project 2025 is a political policy agenda drawn up by the Heritage Foundation – the same right wing think tank that handpicked Trump’s Supreme Court appointees. Unfortunately, packing the Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices and overturning Roe V Wade was only the beginning.
While Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, his connections are obvious. Members of his own administration are behind the writing of it, and Trump himself has spoken at Heritage Foundation events praising them for their policy work. In short, Project 2025 lays out the blueprint for a Donald Trump presidency to further attack abortion rights.
The Abortion Pill
While the abortion pill Mifepristone was allowed to remain on the market following the Supreme Court’s 2024 term, that does not mean it is protected. Project 2025 is a blueprint for packing the federal government with Trump loyalists – including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Should the FDA be run by a Project 2025 appointee, they could reverse the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone and pull the abortion pill off the market nationwide.
Another attack on the abortion pill could come by way of the Comstock Act – a 151 year old anti-obscenity law that prohibits the mailing of abortion related materials. Even informational materials could be considered obscene under Comstock. After Roe fell, Biden’s Department of Justice issued guidance saying that the Comstock Act only applies to people who intentionally break the law. But a Trump administration could roll back that guidance and thus sidestep a gridlocked Congress to ban the most popular type of abortion. The ramifications could expand beyond the shipping of abortion pills, and even extend to the shipment of any medical supplies used for abortion care.
Privacy of Abortion Patients
The Biden administration has issued guidance that under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), hospital staff and medical practitioners cannot disclose to law enforcement suspicion of patients having had an abortion. Further, law enforcement may not demand medical records of patients without a court order.
Project 2025 asserts “fetal personhood,” a long held belief of the anti-abortion movement that a fetus should be granted full legal personhood at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy. If enacted under Donald Trump, Project 2025 would withdraw the Biden administration’s guidance on HIPAA and revoke the medical privacy currently protecting abortion patients.
Additionally, Project 2025 would weaponize the CDC in order to withhold federal funding from states that decline to report abortion data. This surveillance could then be used by Donald Trump to further target abortion access and people’s personal business.
What does Project 2025’s Abortion Agenda Mean For Michigan?
Abortion is legal in Michigan, for now. Abortion care and abortion clinics are protected in Michigan by the Reproductive Freedom for All Amendment, which protects reproductive healthcare under the state constitution. But our state constitution alone is not enough to stand up to Project 2025.
Whether it be through the FDA or the Comstock Act, Donald Trump’s Project 2025 could strip away legal abortion from Michigan citizens. Privacy for abortion patients under HIPAA could similarly be circumvented at the federal level.
Meanwhile, the threat of a national ban on abortion still looms over us. Should Donald Trump enact a national ban, even abortion care in Michigan would be compromised.
At the state level, an anti-abortion majority legislature could work to erode the protections put in place by the Reproductive Freedom for All constitutional amendment. An anti-abortion Michigan Supreme Court could work to interpret the RFFA as loosely as possible in order to pass restrictions on abortion care. At all levels of government, we must remain diligent and vote only for candidates that support reproductive freedom rights and access.
To learn more about Project 2025, we recommend this guide
To find out which candidates on your ballot are pro-choice, we recommend this voter guide
And to register to vote so that you can help fight back, click right here!