The new position in the White House — at a Special Assistant to the President level — would be charged with ensuring “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.”
That’s the plan as it’s articulated in Project 2025, the controversial blueprint for a Donald Trump 2.0 presidential transition that Trump himself has distanced himself from publicly, despite the clear ties between its authors and his top supporters and policy advisors.
[NOTE: Trump’s running mate, JD Vance “wrote a foreword for a forthcoming book by [Project 2025’s] principal architect,” according to sources, including the New York Times. And among numerous other Trump insiders linked to the plan, the RNC platform committee’s policy director Russ Vough authored part of Project 2025.]
Despite Trump’s denials, Democrats continue to treat Project 2025 — which is aimed at a second Trump presidency (beginning in 2025) — as the de facto Trump plan, a suspicion the former president invites when his own policy specifics are expressed vaguely, such as his assertion during the debate with VP Kamala Harris that he had merely “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act. (Agenda47, Trump’s official plan, has much in common with Project 2025, but is less specific.)
BREAKING: In a stunning leak, Donald Trump gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation where he announced the work the foundation did (Project 2025) would be crucial to his policy goals. Retweet so all Americans know Trump will enact Project 2025. pic.twitter.com/6oGLli1qVG
— Kamala’s Wins (@harris_wins) September 16, 2024
During the debate, Harris made the claim that a Trump 2.0 administration “would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages” — a reference to the activities that would fall under the Special Assistant to the President position described above, which critics have called an Abortion Czar.
That pregnancy data itself is already being collected by the CDC from all 50 states, though Project 2025 calls the CDC’s data “woefully inadequate.” (Some states report data on a voluntary basis, instead of being compelled by law.) But woefully inadequate for what?
That’s the worry of pro-choice advocates who find their previously protected freedoms under siege in conservative states that have used trigger laws and new restrictions to virtually or entirely eliminate a woman’s ability to get an abortion.
[NOTE: In 2016, when candidate Donald Trump was asked whether he thought women who sought an illegal abortion should face criminal punishment, he answered: “there has to be some sort of punishment.” At present, “hospital workers are not allowed to tell cops that they suspect someone may have taken pills to induce an abortion. Cops also cannot demand records from an abortion clinic without a court order,” reports The Guardian, restrictions Project 2025 would scuttle.]
Project 2025’s call for an abortion czar that collects the data on every pregnancy in the United States and acts on those data raises the specter of, as Harris said, personal “monitoring” by the federal government on a level heretofore unseen.
[NOTE: Doctors have long been at the forefront of legal abortion cases brought by law enforcement, even when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, and women were also prosecuted for self-managed abortions pre-Dobbs, as is explored in the paper Self-Care: Criminalized.]