Originally by Susan Dunlap at nmpoliticalreport.com
If Project 2025 becomes federal policy next year, it would upend abortion rights and reproductive healthcare through a reshaping of and consolidation of power in the executive branch of federal government.
Project 2025, the conservative policy mandate written by former members of the Donald Trump administration and members of the Heritage Foundation, calls for the remaking of federal agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, as well as others, to consolidate power in the executive branch. Through defunding mechanisms, surveillance strategies and revitalizing a 150-year-old law, it could make many forms of reproductive healthcare, including abortion, virtually impossible to maintain.
Jazmyn Taitingfong, reproductive rights and gender equity attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, called Project 2025 a “dystopian view” and a “destructive federal policy agenda.” She said it would “radically restructure the executive branch.”
“If implemented, these policies could use the powers of the federal government to openly discriminate against marginalized communities, spy on private citizens, and control our most personal decisions about what we can and can’t do with our bodies,” Taitingfong said via email.
Noreen Farrell, executive director of the California-based Equal Rights Advocates, told NM Political Report that “many of the proposals in Project 2025 are all the more insidious because they contemplate action by federal agencies” instead of laws that must pass through the U.S. Congress.
“Even if they are unlawful, it starts the process of so many resources being used to fight unlawful action,” Farrell said.
Bethany Golden, RN and co-director of the California-based reproductive health training initiative Reproductive Health Services Corp. noted, when talking to NM Political Report, that Project 2025 mentions the word “abortion” 180 times in its roughly 900 pages.
“Abortion has to be looked at in the Department of Education, you name the department, it needs to be the focal point to make sure the anti-abortion viewpoint is all encompassing and completely prevalent,” Golden said of the plan.
Fetal personhood
Golden said one impact of Project 2025 on reproductive healthcare would be through its elevation of the conservative legal theory of ‘fetal personhood.’
‘Fetal personhood’ assumes that a fetus should be recognized as having the same rights as the pregnant person the moment two cells connect. Golden said this contains “potential dangers” for in-vitro fertilization, contraception, abortion and miscarriage. She said that, under the ‘fetal personhood’ doctrine, an embryo used in IVF treatment “would be considered a person.”
“It means, legally, it would have specific rights,” Golden said.
The Alabama Supreme Court already legitimized the ‘legal personhood’ doctrine in that state in a court ruling it made last spring. This led to an immediate shuttering of IVF clinics in Alabama. The Alabama legislature and governor then enacted a law that allowed the IVF clinics to resume operations, but the Alabama state law sidestepped the question of ‘legal personhood.’
Golden said the notion of ‘fetal personhood’ has implications for contraception, since it impedes conception. The legal doctrine could have legal impact on a pregnant person who drinks alcohol or uses any form of medication, she said.
“There are implications for whose life is more significant,” Golden said.
Another way in which Project 2025 would, as a policy platform, be able to take control of abortion rights, even in states such as New Mexico, is through the Comstock Act.
Comstock Act and the FDA
The Comstock Act was named for Anthony Comstock, a Victorian postal inspector who lobbied the U.S. Congress to pass the 1873 law to criminalize mailing, among other things, items that can aid in abortion care.
The U.S. Supreme Court rendered this law, signed by former President Ulysses S. Grant, as dormant in 1965 when the high court decided Griswold v. Connecticut. In its decision, the Supreme Court prohibited states from banning contraception for married couples.
Project 2025 calls for reviving the Comstock Act to regulate abortion “aids” that travel through any common carrier and, since it’s already a law, a future president could do so without an act of Congress. Golden said that, through reviving the Comstock Act, abortion medication could not be mailed.
Abortion medication has become the most widely used method of abortion and the use of abortion medication through telehealth has helped to alleviate the crisis in abortion care caused by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Golden said the Comstock Act, if revived, could have more far reaching implications as it could also bar medical supply companies from mailing any OB-GYN equipment needed to “manage many complications for pregnancy and also complications that arise from birth.” She said it could even impact an abortion clinic’s ability to order lightbulbs or medical gowns.
“It would stop abortion in all 50 states. If you can’t mail medical equipment needed, it would be an abortion ban,” Golden said.
The document would also require the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to roll back its approval of the abortion medication, mifepristone.
Federal surveillance strategies
Golden said Project 2025 isn’t just an attack on abortion care. She called it a “control mechanism” and said it was “clearly designed to not allow people to control when, where or how they become pregnant or become parents.”
Project 2025 calls for surveillance strategies. It would, if implemented, reconfigure the U.S. Health and Human Services Department and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to use “every available tool, including cutting funds” to require states to report how many abortions take place, the gestational age of the fetus, what was the reason for the abortion, the pregnant person’s state of residence and the abortion method used.
It would also require federal agencies to track miscarriages, medical treatments such as chemotherapy that results in miscarriage or stillbirth and to track demographic data on abortion patients.
Farrell said that this tracking requirement is an “incredibly disturbing component.”
“This is big brother. This is lacking privacy that has implications not only for reproductive healthcare but all kinds of healthcare. It’s a slippery slope,” she said.
Farrell said that under the plan, the CDC “would be drastically reduced.”
“We’re looking at dismantling and defunding core agencies that make the case for all kinds of care, collect data and track data outcomes. It’s an incredibly broad attack on long-standing agencies seen as objective and medically based,” Farrell said.
Can New Mexico protect itself?
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham told NM Political Report that state laws, such as the Reproductive Health Provider Protections enacted in 2023, should withstand such federal surveillance policy, should Project 2025 become federal regulation. But, she added that she has been recently traveling the country to stump for Vice President Kamala Harris to make sure voters know that “there is a binary choice in this election.”
The Reproductive Health Provider Protections is frequently referred to as a ‘shield law’ because it protects reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare providers from efforts to collect data or information about patients or providers. Lujan Grisham said that New Mexico would likely not be alone in challenging such policies as federal surveillance of abortion care and that other states that participate in the Reproductive Freedom Alliance could join in the battle.
“The best case scenario, [the] New Mexico constitution has broader protections and liberties than the federal U.S. constitution. One way I would expect my lawyers to move forward would be to say, ‘the federal government doesn’t have the power to remove our protections,” she said by phone.
But she also said that with the current U.S. Supreme Court, “in many ways, all bets are off.” The Supreme Court is currently made up of a 6-3 conservative majority, with three justices appointed by Trump.
“They can’t tell us what to do because our constitution has broader freedoms, but it’s this Supreme Court,” she said.
One concern for some is that Project 2025, which calls for various defunding strategies, could force states to implement its policies through defunding abortion clinics, resetting federal block grants and through sweeping changes to Medicaid, which the state is heavily reliant upon. Lujan Grisham said defunding states through various means to ensure they align with Project 2025, “would be incredibly punitive and is exactly the intent.”
She said, however, New Mexico might fare better than other states, if federal dollars were cut in an effort to force the state to align with Project 2025 values. She said that through its sovereign wealth endowment funds, the severance tax fund and the Land Grant Permanent Fund, nearly $60 billion combined could be redirected.
Moving money from the Land Grant Permanent Fund would require a constitutional amendment, though other funds only require a change in law.
“We have a way to fund education and do any number of things, but let’s take this out to its chilling conclusion. We spend $9 billion on healthcare and two-thirds of that comes from the federal government. I wish it didn’t, but it takes a decade out of these generational issues, generational poverty, all that work just gets rolled back and we have to make draconian choices,” she said.
Planned Parenthood
Project 2025 directly calls for defunding Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortion. Currently, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains maintains four clinics—Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Farmington and Las Cruces—in New Mexico. Jack Teter, regional director of governmental affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, told NM Political Report that state Medicaid dollars pays for abortion care in New Mexico for individuals who lack private health insurance coverage, but federal Medicaid matches state Medicaid dollars for all other family planning services by a 90 to 10 match.
Teter said that losing that 90 percent federal match to pay for all other family planning services would create a question of whether states can afford to “backfill” all of those other family planning healthcare services. He said a state like California might be able to do so, but a state like New Mexico would likely not be able to.
“Planned Parenthood is, in some states, the largest provider of family planning services in the Medicaid program. This has been, for a long time, a Republican extremist ambition to remove Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, including services not abortion-related. New Mexico has one of the highest percentages of the population on Medicaid in the whole country,” Teter said.
Teter pointed out that this could impact not just Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountain clinics in New Mexico but also, potentially, hospitals that provide emergency abortions in the event a pregnant person is in the midst of a life-threatening health emergency. Teter said the document instructs the federal government to rescind its guidance on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, often referred to in shorthand as EMTALA.
EMTALA currently ensures that a pregnant person who is having a medical emergency receives stabilizing treatment, including an abortion if necessary. Idaho, which has a near total ban on abortion, is battling with the U.S. Department of Justice over this guidance. Teter said Project 2025 guidance could mean that a person who is miscarrying would not be able to receive stabilizing care in a hospital emergency room.
Abortion care training
The document also calls for halting any abortion care training. Golden said this has implications not just for abortion care, but also for pregnancy. She said one out of five pregnancies “do not move forward.”
“They do not advance for lots of different reasons, including early pregnancy loss. We have to have skills to manage those pregnancies and right now, that is also in jeopardy,” she said.
She said that losing that knowledge base would not only be a “massive toll” on pregnancy and abortion care but it could also impact medical faculty. She said it could mean a generational loss of knowledge.
Golden said that anytime a provider is hesitant to make a decision, that has “very serious implications” for the patient. She said that in states, such as Idaho where patients had to be airlifted to out-of-state hospitals for stabilizing care earlier this year because of Idaho’s abortion ban created “a lot of suffering.”
“If you had a heart attack, you wouldn’t want your doctor to hesitate about what is needed. Timeliness in healthcare is really important. We don’t normally wait until a person’s in dire straits,” Golden said.
Crisis pregnancy centers
The document also appears to promote crisis pregnancy centers. Hailey Zock, staff attorney with Southwest Women’s Law Center, told NM Political Report that, while the document doesn’t mention crisis pregnancy centers outright, it says “alternative options to abortion” should receive state and federal funding. Zock said that phrase is generally considered code to mean crisis pregnancy centers.
Zock said crisis pregnancy centers are considered dangerous because they appear to be reproductive healthcare clinics, but are not. They are run by Christian groups and are not bound by HIPPA, which protects healthcare information shared with a provider. What crisis pregnancy centers do with the healthcare data they collect remains unclear, but Zock said that if the federal government becomes invested in surveillance of abortion care, crisis pregnancy centers could aid in that surveillance.
Zock said crisis pregnancy centers are also considered dangerous because “their agenda is to dissuade people from seeking reproductive healthcare.” She said they generally do not provide guidance on contraception or abortion care and they deliberately confuse the pregnant person in order to delay care.
“They are known to incorrectly date the pregnancy to limit the time a person can get an abortion. It’s insidious. It’s deceptive. It’s harmful,” Zock said.
Negative effects of abortion bans
Teter said that in some states, such as Texas, the negative outcomes abortion bans have had on health outcomes is already clear. He said that, in Texas last year, the infant mortality rate increased by 12 percent.
Farrell said Project 2025’s impact would be especially harmful to women of color in various ways. It would harm immigrant girls who cross the border to the U.S. without an adult by banning their ability to receive an abortion. Project 2025 explicitly calls for that ban.
Farrell said another way it would harm communities of color is through the banning of abortion in general. She said research shows that if abortion is banned, Black women’s deaths will rise in the U.S. by 39 percent. Black women already suffer higher rates of maternal morbidity and mortality due to systemic racism in the healthcare system.
Farrell said there would likely be increases in maternal and infant mortality rates, for other communities of color as well.
“The existential crisis really can’t be overstated,” Farrell said.
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