Trump, Project 2025 and antiabortion extremism

The dire threat of a second Trump presidency

Last week, Donald Trump’s camp released a trial balloon to national media, including the New York Times - that he was contemplating a 16-week abortion ban if he became President. According to a leaked discussion, Trump said he would adopt that position with the conclusion of the GOP nomination process. This is an attempt, of course, to signal that Trump prefers a reasonable, even ‘moderate’ position on abortion, one that those plotting his return to the White House hope will attenuate the post-Roe backlash the GOP has suffered at the ballot box.

As Brian Beutler wrote about this stunt:

I’ll assume nobody reading needs me to explain why Trump’s word is worthless, whether it’s direct from him or laundered through anonymous sources. I’ll also assume everyone knows that his administration, like any Republican administration, will teem with anti-abortion zealots who’ll erect obstacles to abortion wherever they can. They’ll likewise make no effort to prevent red-state policies, like the Alabama Supreme Court’s effective criminalization of IVF, from spreading to other states, or being imposed by the Supreme Court on the entire nation. 

Though this might all seem obvious enough, I’m not sure how much most people are clued into just how extreme the onslaught on abortion access is likely to be in a second Trump administration. The sixteen week scam is an effort to muddy those waters, just as Trump successfully did in 2016 when he played at being a pro-worker economic populist. (Shame on anyone who was fooled by that charade). So, consider what follows as one effort to clear the pond scum that Trump is trying to seed on abortion access (and of course, as a template for what we can expect across a range of important policy areas).

The critical point for contextualizing what awaits us is that the end of Roe did not represent the culmination of a decades-long political project, but only a beginning, when the most significant obstacle to the realization of the dream of the anti-abortion zealots who now dominate the Republican Party was cleared. And with Roe out of the way, each day since then, it seems, has brought fresh reminders of just how those zealots are determined to go to realize that dream.

Just this week, for example, the Tennessee legislature, with unanimous Republican support, killed a bill that would have granted girls under thirteen an exception to the state’s abortion ban. In other words, twelve year-olds (or younger) who are raped (and so no one misunderstands me, there is no such thing as a consensual pregnancy for someone that age) will be forced to carry their fetuses to term.

In Alabama, as has been widely reported, the state Supreme Court has just ruled that fertilized embryos are children and those responsible for disposing of such embryos can be sued for wrongful death, if those embryos are determined to be “extrauterine children,” in the unbelievable wording of the Court. The immediate result is already a cessation of the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state. But as Jessica Valenti observes, the ruling has implications far beyond IVF. According to Valenti, Alabama’s Attorney General, Steve Marshall, “has been itching to punish women who get abortions and anyone who helps them.” Among other things, Valenti notes, Marshall has argued that even telling someone about an out-of-state-clinic should be a prosecutable offense since (quoting Marshall) “one cannot seriously doubt that the State can prevent a mobster from asking a hitman to kill a rival because the agreement occurred through spoken word. So too…for conspiracies to obtain an elective abortion.” To be clear, we’re not talking about some fringe blogger here. We’re talking about the top law enforcement officer in the state. The IVF ruling will only embolden such Ayatollah-like fanaticism.

And it’s critical to understand that such fanaticism, as Valenti’s newsletter, Abortion Everyday, has chronicled tirelessly, is essentially the consensus position on abortion in Republican controlled states, from Ohio to North Dakota to Tennessee, to Alabama and beyond.

While such predations currently only characterize red states, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 envisions imposing them on the rest of the country. Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration, involving many of the leading lights of contemporary right-wing thought in America.

As reported by Melissa Gira Grant, the Heritage Foundation announced Project 2025’s advisory board the day of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe. Grant notes that the board includes:

many familiar names in anti-abortion rights and anti-LGBTQ rights politics, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, which brought the case that overturned Roe; America First Legal, led by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, which sought to depose the leadership of two Texas abortion funds; the Claremont Institute (sample brief from a Claremont fellow: “How Activists Use Your Tax Dollars to Sexualize Kids at School”); Family Research Council (sample brief: “Why Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Should Never Be Specially Protected Categories Under the Law”); and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.”

To repeat, these aren’t fringe bloggers, or even popular right-wing media stars. These are the organizations that constitute the pool from which Trump administration officials will be drawn.

In the foreword to Project 2025, Heritage foundation president Kevin Roberts writes:

“Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today Children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

Among the aims of Project 2025 is to impose a single legal standard of acceptable personhood. Doing so, Project 2025 says, “starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights….out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” (my bold)

On abortion,Project 2025 calls for enforcing the Comstock Act, the long-dormant 19th century law that anti-abortion forces have tried to resuscitate to bar individuals from mailing drugs like Mifepristone, used to terminate pregnancies. Among rightwing legal strategists, a coalescing consensus is that the Comstock Act can be interpreted broadly enough to outlaw any means of obtaining abortions. Notably, a new trick of such forces is not to refer to the Comstock by name, but instead only by its number in the penal code, as part of an effort to obscure just how extreme their designs are.

Indeed, one of the highest profile anti-abortion activists, the lawyer Jonathan Mitchell, an architect of the 2021 Texas law that largely banned abortion in the state, candidly acknowledged to the New York Times that he doesn’t want Trump to be too open about the rightwing’s more extreme plans, including enforcing the Comstock Act as part of their designs for an almost total national ban.

Mitchell, who represented Trump before the Supreme Court in the recent Colorado ballot access case, told the Times “I hope [Trump] doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth…I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”

The Times observes that, while it reported last week “that Mr. Trump had told advisers and allies that he liked the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban…among the people thinking most seriously about actual abortion policy should he win the election, very different plans are underway.”

If Democrats control one house of Congress after November, they can block a national abortion ban. And blue states, as previously noted, will do what they can to protect the right to choose. But we are facing a truly unprecedented threat - an emboldened and extremist GOP, helmed by a conscienceless leader, licking its chops at the opportunity a post-Roe world has opened the door to.

On this issue in particular, one really cannot overstate how dire the danger of new Trump presidency is.