*AMSA does not endorse or oppose any candidate for elected public office.
SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
Project 2025: What Future Physicians Need to Know about Threats
to Departments of Education & HHS, Reproductive Health Care, Physician Autonomy & More
Written by Becky Martin, AMSA Senior Manager of Reproductive Health Advocacy
Project 2025 is a 900+page “far-right policy framework, by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation,” that lays out a step-by-step guide for a conservative presidential administration to implement an “extreme agenda across the federal government from day one.”
AMSA Reproductive Health Project allies at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and the Guttmacher Institute have both analyzed Project 2025 and its plans for reproductive health, abortion care, gender justice, HHS, the Department of Education, and beyond. What we are learning about the impact provisions in Project 2025 would have on healthcare and education in the U.S. is frankly alarming us, and we want to make sure it’s on your radar too!
Here are a few general findings from NWLC we want to highlight, Project 2025:
- “offers sweeping policy proposals that would dramatically overhaul how our federal government, including departments, agencies, sub-agencies, and personnel, would function”
- “seeks to impose a hierarchal, gendered, patriarchal vision of society” and “reinforce racial hierarchies”
- “seeks to dismantle all policies that are described as promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion and to reverse gains on gender justice and racial justice” and “calls for the elimination of federal funding for entities that promote diversity, equity, or inclusion”
- “seeks to harm LGBTQI+ people by narrowly defining sex to mean “biological sex as determined at birth,” seeking to deny transgender and nonbinary people’s existence” and “would undermine protections against sex discrimination in health care”
Related to Abortion Care, Project 2025:
- “calls for the elimination of references to “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights” from all federal rules, regulations, contracts, and grants”
- “disavows abortion as part of health care. It seeks to recast HHS as the ‘Department of Life’ and would establish the mission of HHS as ‘furthering the health and well-being of all Americans from conception to natural death’ “
- “would seek to increase federal surveillance of pregnant people nationwide by mandating state reporting on state abortion data”
- “seeks to drastically expand federal laws that allow hospitals, doctors, and nurses to deny patients the care they need based on providers’ personal beliefs, not based on what is best for the patient”
Related to the Department of Education, Project 2025:
- “seeks to eliminate the Education Department entirely”
- “equates the acknowledgement of transgender people with child abuse and pornography” and “proposes harsh penalties against when school libraries include books that discuss transgender people”
- “calls for prosecuting ‘all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers’ that maintain affirmative action or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies”
- “strip ED’s power to cancel, discharge, or forgive balances, or modify the terms or repayment amounts, of student loan debt”
- “would rescind regulations that made it easy for those who were defrauded by their college—or who attended an institution that closed—to discharge their loans”
Find & share the full report by the National Women’s Law Center here
Project 2025: What It Means for Women, Families, and Gender Justice
The Guttmacher Institute fact sheet How Project 2025 Seeks to Obliterate Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights details how its “far-reaching recommendations would severely limit reproductive autonomy and access to reproductive health care, while turning back the clock on hard-won gains, both domestically and globally.” They find some of the “most serious threats to sexual and reproductive health” in Project 2025 include:
-
Threats to Medication Abortion
Project 2025 strategies include:
- “restricting—and ultimately eliminating—access to mifepristone” and “reinstating medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone that require in-person dispensing and limit who can prescribe and receive the medication”
- “effectively ending telehealth provision of the method” and “revoking mifepristone’s US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, which would remove the drug from the market entirely”
- “bypass the FDA and effectively ban medication abortion—and potentially all abortions—through enforcement of the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law that prohibits mailing anything ‘intended for producing abortion.’ The law could be used to prevent the distribution of medication and supplies needed for abortion care and if applied broadly, it could result in a nationwide total abortion ban.”
-
Broader Attacks on Abortion Access
- Project 2025 “calls on Congress to codify into law the Hyde and Weldon Amendments, harmful policies that limit access to abortion care in the United States by restricting the use of federal funds for abortion care and coverage”
-
Denying Access to Abortion Care in Emergency Situations
- Project 2025 “calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to dismantle the abortion protections provided under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). Refusal to enforce EMTALA’s protections for abortion care puts pregnant people’s lives in jeopardy, by forcing providers to risk criminal charges if they perform potentially lifesaving abortion care.”
-
Increasing Misinformation, Disinformation and Stigma
Project 2025:
- “uses charged, medically inaccurate anti-abortion rhetoric—including language falsely portraying abortion as unsafe—to break down support for abortion rights and bolster efforts to criminalize providers”
- “paves the way for increased criminalization of pregnancy outcomes other than abortion”
- “seeks to redefine basic sexual health education as ‘pornography “’ and “recommends replacing comprehensive sex education with abstinence-only curricula”
-
Weaponization of Federal Medicaid Dollars
- Project 2025 “calls for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to encourage states to eliminate all Planned Parenthood facilities from their state Medicaid programs” and “suggests that CMS create a new regulation that would disqualify abortion providers nationwide”
-
Attacks on Contraception
Project 2025:
- “seeks to severely undermine two cornerstones of US contraceptive provision: Title X, the national publicly funded family planning program, and the federal contraceptive coverage guarantee of the Affordable Care Act”
- “proposes reinstating the harmful “domestic gag rule,” which would prohibit health care providers who receive Title X funding from providing abortion referrals and would require them to be physically and financially separated from any abortion-related activities, including counseling”
-
Impact on Reproductive Health Worldwide
- Project 2025 “proposes immediately reinstating the global gag rule, which would prevent non-US NGOs from receiving US government global health assistance if they used their own, non-US funds to provide abortion services, information, counseling, referrals or advocacy”
Read & share the Guttmacher Institute detailed fact sheet here
How Project 2025 Seeks to Obliterate Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
###
Explore the AMSA Reproductive Health Project
Find news, tips, tools, opportunities & more!
Sign-up Here for AMSA Repro Project eNews & Updates
Please send your comments and suggestions to rhp@amsa.org
