Opinion: Project 2025 seeks to weaponize family planning by taking away women's rights

Let's be clear. In the conservative Heritage Foundation's celebrated blueprint for a new Trump administration — otherwise known as Project 2025 — compliance with "conscience" is elevated to a primary principle of health care. The No. 1 health goal for the Department of Health and Human Services is titled "Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity." It goes on to say "(We) should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.

"From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth. (We) must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care."

Project 2025 continues: "(We) must protect Americans' civil rights by ensuring that HHS programs and activities follow the letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience-protection laws."

What, you might ask, is a conscience-protection law? I never heard of such a law. Whose conscience? What is conscience, anyway?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines conscience as: "The sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or to be good."

Again, whose conscience are we talking about? Yours, mine, that guy sitting over there, members of the Supreme Court such as Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, both blind to the takeover of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Or the conscience of a twice-impeached felon with 34 guilty convictions, and several more crimes pending trial? Does he have a conscience?

No, conscience cannot be used as an argument for denying health care for women and families whose family planning is a personal matter, not a mandated federal opinion. Nor can we naively call an egg and a sperm cell a person at conception. Pregnancy and family planning are personal and medical matters which should be decided by the family and the physician.

But Republicans are clumsily plucking the most essential right of women and men — to bear children and create a family when they want to — out of our hands. Both the government and society will suffer from these consequences. What will happen if society stops producing children? What is this notion that the ex-president wants us to swallow whole: a national registry of pregnancies? Ask yourself why? Does he want the state to control family planning, or regulate who gets to have children and who does not?

We must protect family rights. We must protect the right to choose. We must protect the right of women to receive health care at every turn of their lives. ER doctors around the country are often turning away female patients, in fear of being criminalized for patient care since the shattering of Roe v. Wade. Women in the U.S. are becoming increasingly anxious about pregnancy. What if something is wrong with the fetus’s viability, and the woman’s life is at risk, and medical assistance is not available?

The recent Supreme Court decision may not be going as far as the Republican agenda wants to take us. The Dobbs v. Jackson case sets a perilous course that appears headed toward the banning of contraceptives and intervening in IVF cases.

And then we have candidates here, even in our swing state of North Carolina, people like Republican Mark Robinson, running for governor, who has said, “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of the mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” How dare he malign women with this slander and disrespect.

This is a candidate who certainly does not reflect what we commonly think of as "moral goodness … and blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or to be good."

How does that make you feel about your sister, niece, daughter, granddaughter? If you value the lives and choices of your family members — female, male, trans, et al — then you must vote the Democratic ballot from top to bottom and stop this malevolent slide toward despotism and tyranny. Vote for Josh Stein for governor and protect our existing reproductive and women’s rights for health care in North Carolina. A vote for democracy and the American way of life is true patriotism.

More: Opinion: How concerned should we be if Donald Trump is reelected as president?

More: Opinion: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to further restrict reproductive freedom

Myra Gross Schoen, MFA, is a journalist, book editor and featured columnist for the Citizen Times and Black Mountain News.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Project 2025 aims to deny women health care, family planning