The Project 2025 agenda has drawn a bullseye on reproductive rights. It aims for “the next conservative administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term ‘abortion’ from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. “
It is not comforting that Paul Dans left his director role at the Heritage Foundation, which oversees Project 2025. Sure, djt’s campaign “welcomed” the news because it has been trying to distance the candidate from the plan for months now that folks are paying attention.
The Republican nominee for President has a position on the issue that has been described as “pure jibberish” as he tries and fails to BS his way through questions about Mifepristone.
After the Dobbs decision was leaked in the spring of 2022, I posited that the country could be worse off post-Roe than it was pre-Roe. Sometimes, I HATE being correct.
The SCOTUS leak
(SCOTUS never discovered the source of the leak. Based on Chief Justice Roberts’ public comments, I assumed that he was seeking a “middle ground,” perhaps a ban after 15 weeks. There could have been a 3-3-3 or 3-4-2 outcome, with the CJ getting one or more of the newbies on the court on his side. But when someone – one of Alito’s or Thomas’ clerks? – spilled the beans early, voila! Roe gets overturned.)
The heartbreaking stories of women who have to practically, or actually, have to be on death’s door before receiving treatment when a pregnancy goes wrong. State legislators insist incorrectly that their draconian laws don’t handcuff doctors from providing necessary care.
As The Atlantic reported in 1969(!), and it’s true again in 2024: “As a matter of fact, no one knows what the laws which permit abortion to save the life of the mother mean.”
ABC News put out a special – here’s just a small portion– about the “dire impact of new healthcare restrictions on pregnant women.” I was alternatingly sad and infuriated. Dobbs has brought out the stupid, such as bans against in vitro fertilization.
Defund
What else is Project 2025 calling for? “The policy book instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to ‘issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans’ and ‘propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion.'”
It “also proposes requiring education on ‘fertility awareness-based’ methods of contraception and family planning and suggests eliminating condoms from Health Resources & Service Administration guidelines because they are not a ‘women’s’ preventative service.” The stupidity of this provision is amazing.
“Heritage recommends the next conservative administration direct the CDC to ‘eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.'” I read A Handmaid’s Tale in 1995 but thought it was fiction.
“The book recommends reversing policies that allow ‘the use of public monies … to facilitate abortion for servicemembers.'” Ah, supporting our troops!
The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Perverting the 14th Amendment. So says Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times in response to the 2024 Republican National Committee’s party platform. “In the same way it is perverse for conservative legal activists and Supreme Court justices to use the Reconstruction amendments… to dismantle this nation’s halting efforts at substantive racial equality, it is also perverse for the anti-abortion movement to use the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against bodily autonomy in the name of so-called fetal rights.”
Department of Justice and federal law enforcement
“The policy book states that ‘litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda.'” That’s terrifying.
Do you remember Jeff Sessions? He was the first Attorney General under djt, and he was terrible. Yet he did one correct thing. He recused himself from participating in any DOJ investigation regarding allegations that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, infuriating 45.
There’s no reason to believe that a Republican AG in 2025 would have even that much integrity, based on djt’s attempt to strongarm DOJ, as acting AG Jeffrey Rosen noted in his testimony before the January 6 hearings.
“The policy book [for Project 25] euphemistically calls for the next conservative Administration’ to do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.’ During the final months of his administration, Trump rushed 13 federal executions in 2020 — ‘an unprecedented clip’ compared to the combined total of three federal executions in the preceding 60 years.
“Project 2025 claims that the Biden administration ‘has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity’ and vows to ‘reverse this trend’ by attacking ‘so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination.'” Ah, the old “reverse racism” trope.
“Project 2025 calls to reassign election-related offenses to the Criminal Division of the DOJ rather than the Civil Rights Division… This change would allow a second Trump administration to provide more resources for investigations into bogus claims of voter fraud and bolster efforts to overturn future election results.”
Will we have ever-challenged votes when the results don’t turn out how the White House wishes? It may sound overly dramatic, but this provision alone makes me worry that democracy itself would be in jeopardy.
Look Like a 
Here are some items I’ve come across recently that I thought were helpful. The first is a page from the