Project 2025: What does it say about abortion? Insider wish list for Trump's second term

Since it unexpectedly became a viral phenomenon earlier this year, the project has assumed extraordinary importance in the 2025 presidential campaign.

During the debate, Kamala Harris called it “a detailed and dangerous plan” that Donald Trump “wants to implement if re-elected.”

Trump, meanwhile, insists we shouldn't pay attention to this 922-page behind-the-curtain policy plan, claiming he had “nothing to do with it” and “no idea who's behind it.”

In reality, Project 2025, an initiative launched last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan the next Republican administration, was launched by longtime close allies of Trump. Detailed planning for a Trump second-term agenda along these lines is very real, and while the Project 2025 initiative itself appears to have stalled, other groups have picked up the slack.

In addition, many of Project 2025's key proposals – centralizing presidential power, cracking down on illegal immigrants, downgrading the fight against climate change and abolishing the Department of Education – are fully supported by Trump.

However, Trump's intentions are less clear on one extremely important issue on which Project 2025 made some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.

The Project's plan called for using presidential power to aggressively restrict abortions in a variety of ways. Trump was concerned about the unpopularity of these proposals and said during the campaign that he would not support some of them. He also appears reluctant to completely disavow the social conservatives who have long been an important part of his base.

Harris, in turn, wants to associate Trump with the most extreme version of the conservative anti-abortion agenda. “Understand that in his project there would be a nationwide ban on abortion in 2025,” she said at the debate. That's not entirely true, as the project doesn't call for an explicit ban, but it does contain a proposal that some experts say could lead to a “backdoor abortion ban” depending on how it's implemented. Furthermore, it is certainly true that anti-abortion activists won important positions in the Trump administration last time and expect to achieve such positions again.

Right now, Trump is caught between his fear of electoral defeat if he supports the unpopular ideas of social conservatives and his desire to reward their loyalty to him and keep them at his side. That explains Trump's delicate dance in which he says Project 2025 has some “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” ideas, but never specifies exactly what those bad ideas are, as doing so could anger his supporters.

If he wins, the question will be whether Trump feels free to reward his longtime allies with control of federal abortion policy, as he did last time when he appointed the Supreme Court justices who fell Roe v. Wade.

While Trump may not have been personally involved in Project 2025, much of it was clearly written in the hopes of appealing to him. The group's main policy document conspicuously avoids taking sides on key issues on which Trump has broken with conservative dogmas, such as trade and the future of Social Security and Medicare.

But the only issue on which they have really prevailed over Trump appears to be abortion.

The Project 2025 policy plan was crafted in the months after the Supreme Court imposed the repeal priority long-held by social conservatives Roe v. Wade. However, the anti-abortion movement does not want to stop at returning abortion policy to the states. She advocates that abortion should be understood as the murder of unborn children and wants to use federal power to further restrict abortions.

“Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative administration, should work as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote in the foreword to Project 2025 policy plan.

The plan recommends many anti-abortion measures, but three in particular stand out.

1) Enforce the Comstock Act: Project 2025 calls for prosecuting “providers and distributors of abortion pills who use the mail” via an old anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act—a law that, as my colleague Ian Millhiser writes, “has been in place for almost a year was no longer seriously enforced.” Century.”

Reproductive rights activists have alarmed that the Comstock Law could be used to enforce a “backdoor abortion ban” nationwide. That's because the very broad law says it's illegal to carry not just pills, but any “thing designed, adapted, or intended for the performance of an abortion” by mail or across state lines in interstate commerce to ship. If seriously enforced, they argue, it would effectively be illegal to send basic supplies to abortion clinics.

“If enforced, the Comstock Act would override state laws protecting abortion rights, states with ballot initiatives, and states with other protections,” UC Davis law professor Mary Ziegler told Mother Jones in April.

Some anti-abortion activists have a similar interpretation. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, an influential conservative lawyer (who represented Trump in a lawsuit), told the New York Times in February. But he added: “The extent to which this happens will depend on whether the president wants to take on the political pressure and whether the attorney general or the secretary of health and human services are on board.”

2) Ban on the abortion pill Mifepristone: Claiming that “abortion pills pose the greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” Project 2025 is calling for the revocation of FDA approval of the pill mifepristone, used in about half of all U.S. abortions.

As mifepristone has been challenged in court, many abortion providers have prepared for such a ban, saying they could switch to another therapy that only requires the drug misoprostol. But they fear drugs could become the next target of abortion opponents, as NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin wrote earlier this year.

3) States will require data about who performs abortions: The 2025 Project complains that liberal states are “havens for abortion tourism” (because red state residents can travel there for the procedure) and says HHS must ensure that each state reports to the government “accurately how many abortions occur within.” take place within its limits”. including data such as “mother’s country of residence”. The document recommends cutting federal funding to states if they refuse to provide this data.

It is the above-mentioned proposals from Project 2025 that have proven so politically inconvenient for Trump in this election campaign. He has sounded the refrain that he just wants to let states decide abortion policy, saying, “The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue.” But he also continually promises new details about his intentions for federal policy to be announced – details that somehow never arrive.

When Trump was asked about enforcing the Comstock Act last month, he seemed to answer that he wouldn't do so, but he held back a bit: “No, we'll discuss specifics about it, but generally speaking, no.” Regarding the ban of mifepristone, the Trump campaign takes the position that the Supreme Court has settled the matter – which makes no sense since the court was simply ruling on a procedural issue.

So Trump claims that women have nothing to fear from his abortion policies if he wins. But there are many reasons to question whether you should believe him.

The reality is that some of Trump's key political allies are people who are deeply committed to restricting abortion in the United States. Take his vice presidential candidate JD Vance, for example. In 2022, Vance called for enforcement of the Comstock Act, saying, “I would certainly like to see abortion illegal on a national level.”

Trump's top appointees, tasked with setting federal policy in his second term, would likely include many committed social conservatives. Notably, Project 2025's chapters dealing with abortion were written by two key Trump administration officials: Roger Severino, who served at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Gene Hamilton, who served at the Justice Department (and is a long-time confidant of the Trump administration). ally of Trump policy guru Stephen Miller).

Trump “had the most pro-life administration in history and pursued the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” Severino told the New York Times in February. “This track record is, in my opinion, the best evidence of what a second term could look like if Trump wins.”

There's a classic political saying: “Dance with the one who brought you,” which explains why politicians feel compelled to stand by their loyal supporters. While Trump may be trying to take a more moderate tone on abortion right now, he is a transactional man and knows that social conservatives are among his most important and loyal supporters.

This was evident at the end of August: After several days of enduring pressure from anti-abortion groups, Trump announced that he would stand with them on an abortion measure in Florida.