Women’s Health
Much has been written about the anti-science and anti-women plans for the Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heritage tapped Roger Severino, a former Trump HHS official and husband to Carrie Severino, a top ally of conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, to help write its manifesto. Its crowning achievement would have women having more babies and staying married. This may sound exaggerated, but The Handmaid’s Tale dystopia suggested here can’t be overstated. Roger Severino openly advocates for expanding federal “abortion surveillance” systems: “Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, [italics mine] and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis. Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” he wrote.
Emily Martin of National Women’s Law Center Action Fund said the plan “poses a huge range of real-world threats to women and to their families.” The most significant threat, she said, would be a national abortion ban. The agenda, Martin said, “would seek to use every tool available to the federal government to end abortion nationwide—banning medication abortion, empowering states to criminalize emergency abortion care, and requiring invasive new monitoring and reporting of people’s pregnancy outcomes to the federal government, creating new legal risks even for patients who miscarry and their providers.”
Church and State
Besides its pro-business and anti-woman aspects, the most significant theme in Project 2025 is its insistence on slamming Christian dogma and belief into American law and culture. Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, weighed in on that. “The most alarming part of Project 2025 is its unwavering focus on transforming America from a democracy that strives for equality into a nation that grants power and privilege solely to white Christian nationalists,” she said. “Here is what our country would look like if Project 2025 came to fruition: no more public education as we know it, and instead sending our children and taxpayer dollars to private religious schools that can indoctrinate and discriminate; government favoritism for ‘biblically based’ families and rolling back protections for everyone else, especially LGBTQ+ people and families; and both ‘abortion surveillance’ and limiting abortion and contraception access based on the fundamentalist religious belief that life begins at conception. The transformation from democracy to theocracy would leave America unrecognizable.”
