What Is Project 2025? How the Conservative Plan Would Restrict Women’s Rights

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By now, you may be asking yourself, what is Project 2025? The plan from the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation aims to remake society under the next conservative president. Over 100 conservative groups contributed to the Project 2025 book, Mandate for Leadership, which lays out a detailed plan of action over its nearly 1,000 pages, including many policy proposals that have the potential to relegate women back to second-class status.

“Today, the American family is in crisis,” the document claims in the introduction. “Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70% of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts.”

In an effort to presumably “rescue” their nuclear, heterosexual, married family ideal, Project 2025 would further curtail reproductive rights, make childcare and applying for welfare benefits more difficult for single parents, and introduce “marriage and relationship education” to federally funded family planning programs.

“If implemented, Project 2025 would be the latest attack in Donald Trump’s full-on assault on reproductive freedom,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a recent speech.

Perhaps the scariest part is that the book makes it pretty clear that this is only phase one.

Here are some of the proposed policies that they envision:

Gender Equality

Starting off strong, the Project 2025 book states, “​​The president should immediately revoke Executive Order 14020 and every policy, including sub-regulatory guidance documents, produced on behalf of or related to the establishment or promotion of the Gender Policy Council and its subsidiary issues.”

Executive Order 14020, signed into law by President Joe Biden, established a White House Gender Policy Council, whose purpose is to, “advance gender equity and equality, with sensitivity to the experiences of those who suffer discrimination based on multiple factors, including membership in an underserved community.”

In February of 2023, the council released its first progress report on its efforts to improve gender equality, which included introducing protections for pregnant workers and addressing gender-based violence.

Reproductive Rights

The Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning Roe v. Wade was a big political win for the far right, and Project 2025 shows that they have every intention of curtailing reproductive rights further. The document does not call for a nationwide abortion ban, as some conservative politicians have put forward. Instead, it lays out a strategy for using existing laws to further hamper people’s ability to access abortion.

One particularly frightening policy suggestion in the Project 2025 book is to substantially increase nationwide abortion surveillance. Currently, state health departments report abortion data to the CDC on a voluntary basis. Project 2025’s plan would make abortion data reporting mandatory, and in far greater detail, explicitly to address “abortion tourism.”

“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,” the document states.

For years, Republicans have made sure that no federal funding is used for abortion care through the Hyde Amendment. This plan would take that even further, making sure that no federal funds could be used to assist anyone traveling to a different state for an abortion, and defunding all “abortion providers,” starting with Planned Parenthood.

Project 2025 would also revive the attempt to force the FDA to rescind its approval of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol and, as a “bare-minimum” interim measure, ban prescribing the pills through telehealth.

Furthermore, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) that Project 2025 imagines would, “Ensure that training for medical professionals (doctors, nurses, etc.) and doulas is not being used for abortion training.”

Contraception

Currently, the HRSA-supported Women’s Preventive Services Guidelines, in accordance with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), recommends that adult women have full access to all forms of contraception, including surgery and emergency contraception.

Project 2025 wants coverage of what it calls the “week after pill” removed from the guidelines, as they claim it is a “potential abortifacient.” They are referring here to Ella, a morning-after pill that is not an abortifacient, but can be effective up to five days after unprotected sex. Project 2025 then goes a step farther, and even calls for the elimination of the “male condom” from the guidelines.

None of this amounts to an outright ban on contraception, but it does show a serious effort to limit the availability of all kinds of birth control.

Childcare

Numerous studies have shown that access to affordable childcare is critical to women’s success in the workplace, and that universal childcare leads to better overall employment and financial outcomes for women. While a long way from true universal childcare, the government’s Head Start programs offer free, federally funded pre-K to children of low-income parents.

Project 2025 proposes eliminating Head Start altogether, stating, “Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children. Given its unaddressed crisis of rampant abuse and lack of positive outcomes, this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS.”

However, the Brookings Institute found in 2016 that participation in Head Start programs improved educational outcomes, helped with social and behavioral development, and promoted positive parenting.

But Project 2025 doesn’t just want to do away with Head Start. It also rejects the notion of universal childcare altogether in favor of incentivizing “home-based” childcare solutions.

“Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” it reads.

While these policies would not explicitly eject women from the workforce, it is reasonable to predict that they would naturally drive many women to choose the more affordable, stay-at-home option.

Welfare

Project 2025 asserts that families with two married, heterosexual partners lead to “objectively” better outcomes for children, and so suggests tying federal assistance to marriage.

For instance, it proposes diverting child welfare funds to a conservative Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) program, even though a recent 2022 study found that such programs have “non-significant effects” on child well-being.

In a section on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, the document just stops short of calling for these benefits to be contingent on marital status.

“Additionally, TANF priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way,” the book states. “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.”

Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, and Divorce

What is Project 2025’s goals for these issues? Unclear. The plan has no policy goals or recommendations that directly address any of these issues, only a consistent conviction that heterosexual marriage must be incentivized and promoted wherever possible.

The cumulative total of these policies, if enacted, would only be to make it more difficult for women to leave a dangerous or abusive marriage than it already is.

Originally Appeared on Glamour