Kamala Harris Must Fight Against Project 2025’s Anti-Abortion Roadmap

In late June, I was on the train with a good friend who attends school in Iowa, a state that recently banned abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy, before most people even know they’re pregnant. My friend explained how people at their school were already planning on stocking up on contraceptives such as birth control and Plan B, not only for themselves, but to share with classmates in need. They felt as if they could not trust their state—or school—to help students access necessary resources in case of a health-care crisis.

Their story is not unique. This is why I sincerely fret over the health-care implications of a second Donald Trump presidency—whether it be gender-affirming care, abortion care, or the affordability of it all. The primary burden of ensuring reproductive health-care access should not have to rest on the shoulders of teenagers and 20-somethings. The responsibility rests on political leadership.

Although Trump has attempted to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025, the policy roadmap for a second Trump term paints a grim picture of conservatives’ agenda for reproductive health care. For context, the Heritage Foundation, the premier conservative think tank, wrote similar policy compilations for the last few conservative presidencies, and former Republican presidents have enacted many of Heritage’s suggestions. CNN reported that at least 140 former Trump administration officials were involved with the document’s formulation, including some of its most radical anti-abortion aspirations.

Life-threatening anti-abortion proposals are littered throughout its 30 chapters. In Project 2025’s preface, the authors tout the implementation of blanket “bans on federal funding for abortion” via the executive branch as the next step in post-Roe America. They celebrate this as a victory for families, completely disregarding that U.S. maternal mortality rates are 62 percent higher in states without protected abortion access.

In Chapter 14, the authors assert that abortion pills are a premier threat to the health and “welfare of women and girls” everywhere—a stance in direct contradiction to the scientific consensus. Furthermore, this is their justification for the hypothetical restriction of all abortion pills by the Food and Drug Administration under a second Trump term. The most frequently referenced chapter in relation to abortion care, Chapter 17, proposes a prosecutorial crackdown on “providers and distributors of abortion pills that use the mail” spearheaded by the Department of Justice.

Project 2025’s abortion limitations do not stop with the United States. Conservatives intend to create a global cultural shift toward the complete stigmatization of all abortion care, as well. In Chapter 9, its authors encourage the United States to primarily fund “faith-based” health care worldwide as a tenet of USAID—a dog whistle for forcing pregnant people to carry to term in the vision of a Christian nationalist, moralist agenda. All funding for NGOs that provide abortion services would be terminated.

They want to make the country’s abnormally high maternal mortality rate the international standard.

Even with conservatives’ hyper-focus on abortion restrictions, Trump claimed earlier this month that abortion was not at the forefront of voters’ minds. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris thinks—and knows—the opposite is true. For a stark change, it is refreshing to see a presidential nominee who is directly impacted by crackdowns on reproductive health care.

But it’s not enough to just be a woman running for president.

Harris’ campaign should stress the importance of reproductive health-care access beyond the bare minimum of preventing a federal ban on abortion. She must campaign unapologetically for the active subsidization, legalization, and protection of abortion care. She must incentivize educational institutions in abortion-restrictive states to give resources to students to get the health care they need.

Abortion care restrictions will impact everyone reliant on U.S. subsidization. It is far greater than one local context.

While some may deride Harris’ campaigning on abortion as needlessly divisive, I beg to differ. Polls show that extremist restrictions of reproductive health care are unpopular. According to Gallup, a plurality of Americans (85 percent) support the legalization of abortion to some extent. Fifty-seven percent of Americans were opposed to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the crucial swing state of Arizona, some Republican officials backtracked their support of the state’s 1864 abortion ban—they knew that such a position was too extremist to guarantee reelection. Arguably, it is the same reason a national abortion ban was not mentioned in the official GOP platform for the first time in 40 years.

While many Democrats have said they are incredibly relieved now that President Joe Biden has departed from the ticket, I urge us and the Harris campaign to not lose sight of what is at stake for all Americans this election.

Harris must protect our health care, and our right to abortion, at all costs.

The post Kamala Harris Must Fight Against Project 2025’s Anti-Abortion Roadmap appeared first on Rewire News Group.