Leven is a policy consultant specializing in democracy and state and local government reform. She leverages her practical policy experience to deliver nonpartisan analysis through "This Week in Abortion," a newsletter featuring insightful reads, news updates, original analysis, and more.
Although we are divided, most Americans believe that some access to abortion should be guaranteed. This includes a majority of Republicans, who, since 1975, have agreed that there should be legal access to abortion under certain circumstances.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, disagrees. “Abortion,” the plan says, “is not health care.” It takes this already extreme position further by constantly defining life as starting at conception. We’re talking egg-meets-sperm conception. By this definition, standard in vitro fertilization would be illegal as would some forms of birth control.
“Eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient. One of the emergency contraceptives covered under the HRSA preventive services guidelines is Ella (ulipristal acetate). Like its close cousin, the abortion pill mifepristone, Ella is a progesterone blocker and can prevent a recently fertilized embryo from implanting in a woman’s uterus. HRSA should eliminate this potential abortifacient from the contraceptive mandate.”
This is not surprising. The list of advisors and authors involved with Project 2025 is a who's who of the anti-abortion movement. What is shocking is how this extreme idea is embraced as a cornerstone of U.S. domestic and international policy, undermining our democracy in the process.
Let’s start with the Department of Health and Human Services. The plan prescribes an unprecedented shift in focus. As their number one goal, the plan says, “The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one (conception).”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would fund politically-motivated research [2] that assumes any interruption of pregnancy after conception is bad for your bodily and mental health. It would also promote fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs) for birth control. The plan returns to this idea across HHS services, claiming without even so much as a footnote that, “FABMs are highly effective” at preventing pregnancy.
“The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation. It should ensure that it is not promoting abortion as health care. It should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion.”
There is a method to this madness. Under threat of funding cuts, the CDC would require detailed reporting on abortion from every state. Combined with the personal information it could collect from period-tracking apps (see FABM) and the repeal of guidance that clarifies abortion related-care is protected private health information, the plan is laying the groundwork for a citizen surveillance network.
“Data Collection. The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, 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. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.”
The plan further calls for the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to adopt explicitly anti-abortion biases. It says the NIH should “promote a research agenda that supports pro-life policies.” It calls on the FDA to rescind the decades-old approval of abortion pills, with language that grossly misrepresents the actual scientific facts.
“Since its approval more than 20 years ago, mifepristone has been associated with 26 deaths of pregnant mothers, over a thousand hospitalizations, and thousands more adverse events, but that number does not account for all complications. Of course, this does not count the hundreds of thousands to millions of babies whose lives have been unjustly taken through chemical abortion.”
I have only covered a tiny piece of the anti-abortion policies the department would push if it follows Project 2025, but HHS is far from the only place this agenda reaches. Let’s talk foreign policy.
The plan proposes making respect for “authentic human rights (including the belief that conception is life) a litmus test of personnel decisions” within the State Department, and prioritizes similar moves at USAID through Schedule F. It also suggests the president reconsider America’s participation in every international organization using this same lens, while building up a coalition of countries under the “ Geneva Consensus Declaration,” a regressive anti-abortion manifesto created under the Trump administration. There are currently 36 signatories to the declaration. Not one of our top 15 trading partners (75 percent of overall trade) has signed on. Instead, the list includes Russia along with Libya, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, three of the 15 worst-rated countries on The Economist’s Democracy Index.
The next Administration should direct the Secretary of State to initiate acomprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all internationalorganizations. This review should take into account long-standing provisions infederal law that prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to promote abortion,population control, and terrorist activities, as well as other applicable restrictionson funding for international organizations and agencies with a view to withholdingU.S. funds in cases of abuses. (191)
The U.S. government should not and cannot promote or fund abortion ininternational programs or multilateral organizations. Technically, the UnitedStates can prevent its international funding from going toward abortions, but theU.S. will have a greater impact by including like-minded nations and building onthe coalition launched through the Geneva Consensus Declaration, with a view toshaping the work of international agencies by functioning as a united front. (192)
Under the plan, we may come to look more like these authoritarian friends. The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, having been stripped of any independence, would be called on to enthusiastically enforce the Comstock Act. Using a politicized interpretation, the plan argues this act can be used to shut down access to abortion. If states don’t want to expend their resources participating in this interpretation, the FBI would be empowered to increase its presence on the ground, and the DOJ could take legal action against local officials.
Enhancing the Federal Focus on and Resources in Jurisdictions with Rule-of-Law Deficiencies. A disturbing number of state and local jurisdictions have enacted policies that directly undermine public safety, leave doubt about whether criminals will be punished, and weaken the rule of law. While the prosecution of criminal offenses in most jurisdictions across the country must remain the responsibility of state and local governments, the federal government owes a special responsibility to Americans in jurisdictions where state and local prosecutors have abdicated this duty…
Use applicable federal laws to bring federal charges against criminals when local jurisdictions wrongfully allow them to evade responsibility for their conduct. The department should also increase the federal law enforcement presence in such jurisdictions and explore innovative solutions to bring meaningful charges against criminals and criminal organizations in such jurisdictions.
Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action againstlocal officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizensthe “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).(553)
Fighting abortion without resorting to authoritarianism is possible. However, this plan isn’t happy relying on Congress to make laws and isn’t stopping with undoing some executive orders. Under this plan the United States government becomes a conception-is-life propaganda machine. It uses taxpayer money to intentionally discredit the expertise and integrity of our scientific agencies, threatens strategic international collaboration and alliances over an extremist moral ideal, and makes a loyalty and morality test the first requirement for public service. All this while potentially building a system to monitor the details of our private lives.
We are probably not going to wake up tomorrow in “The Handmaid's Tale.” But this plan represents a decisive movement away from the liberty and the democracy that is the promise of America, towards as the plan says, the Conservative “promise to America” in which a centralized tribalistic elite are not serving the people, but rather are engineering the country to fit their purpose and ideals.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.