Project 2025 & Abortion

Everything you need to know about Trump's plan for women

Chances are, you’ve heard about Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation and created by a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations, this massive document isn’t just a wishlist—it’s a road map for another Donald Trump presidency. 

The brief was written by some of the most powerful conservative thinkers and activists in the country, two-thirds of whom served under the Trump administration. Essentially, the world’s worst people got together to draft a detailed plan for creating their vision of a right-wing utopia—or dystopia.

As Vox wrote, Project 2025 isn’t “a pie-in-the-sky policy agenda full of bold but empty promises..it is crafted to be a list of things the next president’s appointees really can do.” That’s why Trump has been trying to distance himself from the document; he doesn’t want voters to see just how radical his team’s plan for America really is. 

As you might guess, that plan has a lot to say about our rights—much of it explicit, some of it more hidden. So, I thought you could use an explainer on what Project 2025 says about abortion and what it means for women more broadly.

For ease of reading, I’ve included a brief summary below, and you can skip ahead to the topics you’re most interested in:

How Project 2025…Impacts Abortion, Restricts Birth Control, Endangers Women’s Lives, Attacks Private Data, Enables Clinic Violence, Traps Women.

The full text of Project 2025 is available here.

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Project 2025 Summary

If enacted, Project 2025 wouldn’t just ban abortion. It’s a step-by-step plan on how the government can force American women out of public life and back into the home.

In addition to repealing FDA approval for abortion medication and criminalizing the shipping of abortion pills and supplies, Project 2025 also calls for a Trump presidency to redefine emergency contraception as an ‘abortifacient” (they call it the “week after” pill), permit hospitals to deny women life-saving abortions, ban funding for groups that help women leave anti-abortion states, and allow extremists to harass clinic patients and providers without fear of consequences. 

These are mostly policies and tactics we’ve heard about before and watched take hold since Dobbs. Republicans have been open, for example, about wanting to dismantle the FACE Act, which protects abortion clinics and patients from violence and harassment. They’ve also openly targeted EMTALA, fighting for the power to deny patients life-saving abortions.

But Project 2025’s disturbing vision for American women becomes even clearer when you start to connect the less explicit dots. That’s when you see how another Trump presidency could mean the end of women’s freedom as we know it. 

Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to become the “Department for Life.” Under this new name, the government would track women’s pregnancies, including abortions, miscarriages and stillbirths; dismantle sex education; replace birth control programs with “fertility awareness” and marriage promotion programs; allow employers to refuse birth control coverage; allow healthcare providers and pharmacists to refuse to dispense medication they morally oppose; and divert child care funding into programs that push women to stay at home.

If you had any doubts about the intent of this document, consider the who’s who of Project 2025 contributors. There’s Stephen Billy, for example, from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Leaked audio from a 2022 strategy session with Tennessee lawmakers caught Billy advising Republicans on when and how to ban birth control and IVF. Another contributor, Russ Vought, was the policy director for the GOP platform writing committee and someone Students for Life once called, “Trump’s most pro-life cabinet member.” I could go on.

If all of this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. What makes Project 2025 so insidious is that any one recommendation may not raise red flags to everyday voters. For example, calling on the federal government to “prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care,” probably won’t sound so terrible to someone who would like extra support to be able to stay home with their toddler. But when you read that language in the context of the rest of the document—which calls for the end of birth control and women’s ability to get life-saving care—a much more nefarious picture emerges.

Let’s dig into it bit by bit.

How Project 2025 Impacts Abortion

Project 2025 has a very detailed plan to end abortion in the U.S. It’s not a coincidence that they want to rename the Department of Health and Human Services the “Department for Life.” That’s how big the groups behind this document see the federal government’s role in ending women’s reproductive rights.

End of Abortion Medication: Project 2025 describes abortion medication as the “single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” and plans for a Trump administration FDA to reverse its approval. While that process is underway, the document wants the agency to immediately restore requirements that the medication only be used up until seven weeks of pregnancy and that it only be dispensed in-person, “to eliminate dangerous tele-abortion and abortion-by-mail distribution.”

Comstock Act: Criminalizing the mailing of abortion medication is a significant focus. Indeed, law professor Mary Ziegler told Abortion, Every Day that the Comstock Act “is the centerpiece of Project 2025.” And while the document doesn’t cite the Comstock Act by name, it refers to and links to the zombie obscenity law several times in the document, calling for the end of “mail-order abortions.”

Given that conservatives define certain kinds of birth control as abortifacients, it’s safe to assume those would be targeted as well. Comstock would even criminalize the shipping of abortion supplies—anything used in an abortion would be in danger.

Under the Radar: Project 2025 doesn’t only call for the criminalization of mailing abortion medication but also the “interstate carriage of abortion drugs.” That means they want to criminalize anyone who transports abortion pills from one state to another in any way. In their America, someone who drives abortion medication just a few miles across a border is a ‘drug trafficker.’

How Project 2025 Restricts Birth Control

Feminists have been warning about conservatives’ attacks on birth control for decades, and Project 2025 makes clear that all those fears were well-founded.

Emergency Contraception: Project 2025 redefines emergency contraception as an abortifacient, calling it the “week-after-pill.” The idea is to make emergency contraception—commonly known as the morning-after pill—seem less like birth control. This tactic is one conservatives have been laying the groundwork for over years, one we’ve covered often at Abortion, Every Day:

The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part I)

Conscience Laws: Project 2025 calls for the end of the Affordable Care Act’s mandatory insurance coverage for birth control. Under a Trump administration, employers could cite “religious and moral exemptions” to avoid covering workers’ contraception. Pharmacists could use similar ‘conscience’ objections while refusing to fill women’s birth control prescriptions. (I predict we’re going to see a lot more cases involving pharmacists; Alliance Defending Freedom has already started representing them in various lawsuits.)

Title X: Title X is the country’s federally funded family planning program, which provides millions of dollars to ensure people have access to low- and no-cost contraception. We already know conservatives want to gut the program—Republicans’ latest funding proposal would cut over $280 million from Title X. But Project 2025 goes even further.

The document seeks to “reframe” the program to focus on “fertility awareness and holistic family planning,” and to “provide educational information on healthy marriage and relationships.”

What’s more, Project 2025 calls for the end of “religious discrimination in grant selections” for Title X. What that means in plain English is that they want to give those millions of family planning dollars to crisis pregnancy centers and other religious groups that oppose birth control. (This is something AED has also raised the alarm about.)

Under Project 2025, people who go to federally funded clinics for affordable birth control would instead be told to go get married.

Under the Radar: Republicans have already started their attacks on birth control for teenagers, and Project 2025 gives us a disturbing hint at what might come next. In the section about abortion medication, the document warns about the “potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls.” This is an argument I suspect we’re going to see used against contraception as well. Just as conservatives claim gender-affirming care shouldn’t be given to minors, they’ll say the same about hormonal birth control.

How Project 20205 Endangers Women’s Lives

The consequences of abortion bans have been on full display since Dobbs—with women going septic, being forced into c-sections, and even dying. Disturbingly, the conservative reaction to that horror has been to insist that states should have the right to deny women life-saving abortions: Republican leaders and activists argued in front of the Supreme Court that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)—the federal law mandating hospitals give life-saving and stabilizing care—doesn’t include abortions.

That same awful idea is echoed throughout Project 2025, making clear that these are people who would rather see women dead than abortion be legal, even in the most dire circumstances.

Project 2025 claims that EMTALA actually requires hospitals to “explicitly protect unborn children,” and that those who don’t could lose all of their federal funding and face civil penalties. Not only does conservatives’ plan allow for states to let women die, it calls for a Trump government to end any investigations “into cases of alleged refusals to perform abortions.” In other words, hospitals being investigated for refusing women life-saving care won’t be held accountable.

Under the Radar: Project 2025 says many times over that abortion is not healthcare, and that it’s not necessary to save a person’s life. When citing maternal death rates, for example, the document insists, “this problem is not solved by abortion.” And in a section on abortion medication, Project 2025 blasts the FDA for approving the drug because it was “premised on pregnancy being an ‘illness’ and abortion being ‘therapeutically’ effective at treating this ‘illness.’”

This is both incredibly terrifying and really, really important. If you’re a regular reader, you know that the anti-abortion movement is desperate to divorce abortion from healthcare. (That’s why they’re pushing c-sections and the fake medical term ‘maternal fetal separations.’)

Just last week, I highlighted a new paper from the country’s foremost anti-abortion activists who wrote, “there is no disease, illness or condition for which an induced abortion has been determined to be a standard of care…” Project 2025 shows just how much they’re digging into this idea.

To put it plainly: Under a Trump administration, there’s no such thing as a life-saving abortion.

How Project 2025 Attacks Private Data

Data collection has become one of the fastest-growing anti-abortion strategies since Roe was overturned—from laws forcing doctors to ask women invasive questions and report their answers to the state to the fabrication of abortion ‘complication’ data. In Project 2025, conservatives’ obsession with data is clearer than ever.

Pregnancy Surveillance: The document calls for the CDC (now housed under the “Department of Life”) to create a national abortion database and adopt a surveillance system requiring all states to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.”

But here’s the thing: While Project 2025 calls this ‘abortion data,’ what they’re really talking about is pregnancy data. Under a Trump presidency, this mandate wouldn’t just require states to report abortions—it would require reporting any pregnancy that doesn’t end in a live birth. The document says the CDC should collect data on every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth and even “treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy).”

Fake Statistics: Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are increasingly relying on dubious studies and data collection to ‘prove’ that abortion is dangerous despite all evidence to the contrary. You may recall AED’s investigation into how Texas doctors are forced to report abortion ‘complication’ data. Project 2025 calls for much more of the same: funding for studies on the “risks and complications of abortion,” research that “explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls,” and a mandate that the CDC collect data on “abortion-related maternal deaths.”

That last one—the notion of ‘abortion-related maternal deaths’—is why Republicans are placing anti-abortion activists like Ingrid Skop on state maternal mortality committees. Skop believes, for example, that suicides should be counted as abortion-related deaths if the person had an abortion at any point in their life.

We’ve already seen how studies and statistics have been used in lawsuits all the way up to the Supreme Court to support false claims about abortion—imagine that with the power of the federal government behind it.

Under the Radar: If Trump is elected, a “pro-life task force” would oversee all of the anti-abortion efforts by the “Department of Life,” including data collection, funding for ‘marriage promotion,’ and more. You can be sure that this task force would include the kinds of extremists that Republicans have been calling on as ‘experts’ since Roe was overturned.

How Project 2025 Enables Clinic Violence

Anti-abortion violence has been on the rise since Roe was overturned. Instead of trying to curb the threats, harassment, and violence, conservatives are working to protect the perpetrators. Republicans have been lobbying to end federal protections for reproductive health clinics, while anti-abortion groups are suing to end buffer zones, claiming that they’re free speech violations.

That strategy is mirrored in Project 2025, which calls for an end to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which makes the obstruction of abortion clinics and violence against them a federal crime. It also declares that the Department of Justice should “enforce existing federal law that prohibits mailing abortifacients, rather than harassing pro-life demonstrators.”

Essentially, Project 2025 makes clear that those who harass and attack abortion clinics, providers, staff, and patients will be able to do so with impunity—and without consequences.

How Project 2025 Traps Women at Home

Overturning Roe was never just about ending abortion—it was about going back to a time when women had no vote, no choices, and no freedom. (There’s a reason conservatives are so eager to pass abortion bans from the 1800s!) So, Project 2025’s vision for women was never going to be limited to rolling back abortion rights.

The goal is to force women back into the home, for good.

Project 2025 attacks early childhood education, for example, claiming that children in daycare “experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect.” The plan calls for abandoning any plans for universal pre-k, instead diverting funding to “offset the cost of staying home with a child” and “home-based childcare.” Who will be at home providing this care? I think we all know.

This obsession with traditional gender roles is everywhere in Project 2025, and marriage is at the center of it all. The document insists that “many of the problems government programs are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family.”

Under Project 2025, any health, financial, or childcare support for women is replaced with prompts to simply find a man. Even funding once allocated for child abuse would be allocated to “marriage and relationship” education.

As I noted in the summary, it’s really the confluence of multiple attacks that makes Project 2025’s regressive vision for women so clear. Girls growing up without sex education; funding for birth control rerouted to ‘marriage promotion’ programs; pharmacists refusing to dispense contraception and employers refusing to cover it; support that used to go to daycare now encouraging you to stay home. And, of course, no ability to end a pregnancy ever, for any reason.

What better way to force women out of the public sphere than ensuring that we’re forever pregnant? They don’t even need to say out loud that they want us back in the kitchen—under Project 2025 and a Trump presidency, we’d never leave there in the first place.

What Next?

There’s so much more in Project 2025 that we could delve into. For example, the way it implicitly opposes IVF without saying so explicitly. (In a country where embryos are considered people, fertility treatments become impossible.) Or how the plan ensures that people will be arrested for abortion and pregnancy related ‘crimes’: Project 2025 calls for district attorneys who decline to prosecute certain cases, like abortion, be punished.

The truth is that disdain for women and our bodies is embedded in every sentence of this plan. And as so many others have pointed out, these aren’t vague or toothless threats. This is precisely what would happen under another Trump presidency. We’re not overreacting, and we’re not being ‘hysterical.’ Conservatives have given us their roadmap, laying their vision out plainly for the world to see.

The question is, are we going to take them seriously?

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Compiled with research by Grace Haley.