The Overton Window and Project 2025

This Week in Abortion is a collection of good reads, news, and policy insights.

Welcome back to This Week in Abortion - Your roundup of good reads, news updates, and policy insights on abortion. 

This week's feature is an original discussion about Project 2025 and the Overton Window followed by a deep dive into the Heritage Foundation’s policy plan. 

I’m taking the next few weeks off to catch up on project work, enjoy my birthday, and get my kid ready for pre-K. But, I already have a fun feature in mind for when I return. So, stay cool and watch your inbox for This Week in Abortion in September!

Project 2025 and the Overton Window

Everyone is talking about Project 2025. The article below, which I originally published in The Fulcrum, makes me part of that club. It’s so cool, it’s passé. Given that, I think it’s worth taking a step back to consider the motivations and environment surrounding this astounding document.

Project 2025 is an aspirational policy project. It provides a central organizing narrative that can be boosted by a willing administration and - with or without a partner in the white house - will serve as a starting point for advocates for years to come. It is an obvious attempt to shift the Overton Window.

For any issue, say abortion, there is a broad set of policy ideas, and most politicians are only willing to support the most mainstream among them. This is the Overton Window. The theory goes that advocates can shift that window by making the extreme seem possible. Even if the most extreme policies they advocate for don’t become a reality, advocates will have gained ground by shifting what politicians are willing to do. For example, it might not be politically feasible for the next president or Congress to seriously curtail access to IVF and birth control. This is not in the Overton Window today. But, by attacking IVF and birth control, Project 2025 might make it easier for a future administration to get there. 

If Project 2025 isn’t talked about, the dangerous ideas within it can quietly serve as the guidance they are meant to be. But, the more people talk about extreme ideas, the more the public is used to hearing about them, and the more acceptable they may become. Especially if the reality doesn’t pan out to be as extreme as the plan is portrayed. Imagine in four years commenters saying, “it sucks that IVF is so expensive and complicated now that barely anyone can get it, but at least we still have access to IUDs. It could have been so much worse.” It’s a Catch-22. 

I don’t have a perfect answer. We have to talk about Project 2025 because it really will drive macro policy under a Trump administration and in the conservative movement for years to come. But, giving it too much credit is a gift that it doesn’t deserve - looking at you Democratic strategists.

What I can offer is my attempt at responsible framing. Project 2025 represents an authoritarian shift, not a leap. But, a shift is how it starts.

Project 2025: Abortion and Democracy

This article was originally published in The Fulcrum. 

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. (485)”

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.(454)”

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. (455)”

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. (458)”

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 a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations. This review should take into account long-standing provisions in federal law that prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to promote abortion, population control, and terrorist activities, as well as other applicable restrictions on funding for international organizations and agencies with a view to withholding U.S. funds in cases of abuses. (191)

The U.S. government should not and cannot promote or fund abortion in international programs or multilateral organizations. Technically, the United States can prevent its international funding from going toward abortions, but the U.S. will have a greater impact by including like-minded nations and building on the coalition launched through the Geneva Consensus Declaration, with a view to shaping 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 against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “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.

News Highlights

• 👍 Lizelle Gonzalez’s lawsuit against a Texas sheriff and prosecutors can proceed. Gonzalez was held for two days on murder charges for a self-managed abortion. Even though the prosecutor later said the charge was a mistake, her case is a critical reminder of what is possible with abortion and pregnancy is criminalized. 

• 👍 Abortion in Utah remains legal until about 18 weeks after the Supreme Court ruled the state’s all-out ban should stay on hold until a lower court can rule on its constitutionality. Now at least one legislator is pushing for a special session to vote on a four to six-week ban.

• 👍 A woman who was denied an emergency abortion two years ago is suing one of the health systems that turned her away. As usual, I don’t like what happened to her and the hospital is the accused here even though they aren’t directly responsible for the laws. But, the more people who take their case to court the better.

• 👎Iowa’s abortion ban went into effect on Monday, making it one of four states that bans abortion after 4-6 weeks. 

• 👍 The wrongful death suit that sparked an IVF crisis in Alabama this spring is over. The couple dropped the suit this week. 

• 👎In North Carolina a federal judge rejected a vague requirement that doctors document the location of a pregnancy before prescribing abortion pills. The requirement created medically unnecessary barriers to access. However, the judge upheld a requirement that abortions after about 12 weeks be performed in hospitals. This is already past the recommended period for medication abortion, but it does narrow and complicate access by eliminating clinics as an option for routine abortion procedures. 

• 👎Nebraska ~12-week ban is here to stay. The state’s Supreme Court upheld the law this week, rejecting a “single subject” challenge. Nebraska, and a number of other states, require that individual bills address only one policy subject. In this case, the court ruled that since both abortion and transgender care involve medical procedures the legislation constitutes a single subject.

• 👎Texas is suing the Biden administration in an effort to prevent teens from getting birth control and related confidential care without parental consent.

• 😑The final three individuals in the 2021 blockade of a Tennessee clinic were sentenced to three years probation. The organizers of the blockade previously received sentences from 6 months in prison to three years of supervised release. 

• 😑 In a separate case, a woman received over three years in prison for interfering with the operation of a health center in NYC using threats and violence. 

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