Peter Walks for Democracy

Trump’s and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a regressive manifesto that places far right fundamentalist Christianity over Americans’ liberty. It is an all-out assault on women’s autonomy.

Two years ago, the six reactionary Christians on the Court wiped out women’s privacy, women’s autonomy, and a woman’s right to plan her family. On numerous occasions, Trump has celebrated, saying “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” His three appointed Supreme Court justices were involved. He has taken credit for the draconian anti-women’s health bills extremists have been advancing in states across the country. 

It’s been in the works for years. In 2022, Trump said, “the Heridges [sic]…are going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming,” Project 2025 will make The Handmaid’s Tale a reality.

Dysfunctional Trump appointee Roger Severino wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Severino says, HHS should “maintain a biblically based…definition of marriage and family” and act accordingly. He forwards an extreme system to restrict doctors from providing effective care to women and to prevent women from traveling across state lines to access care. Severino outlines the requisite surveillance apparatus. Purely ideological, it has nothing to do with improving HHS’s mission to enhance sound medical science, health or well-being. Given his love of power, we know Trump will create a surveillance bureau to monitor women like the Iranian Guidance Patrol enforcing sharia law. Their church (where Trump has never gone) and your state are one and the same whether you go to their church or not.

Meanwhile, the same chapter omits exigent items to Americans’ health, security, and dignity. There is not a single mention of gun violence. Guns are the leading cause of death among young people. American women are more likely to be murdered by a partner with a firearm than die of obstetric complications. 68% of pregnant women victims were killed with a gun. Bringing it full circle, research shows that restricting women’s access to reproductive health care further isolates them and places them in more danger.

None of this seems to matter. Births matter. But the lives of women and children thereafter? They’d be on their own in a so-called Christian nation where guns have more rights than women and children do.

The United States Constitution sets forth a system to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Trump’s and the GOP’s anti-health, anti-choice, and anti-woman agenda is an all-out assault on our welfare and our liberty. In their dissent to the opinion that ended Roe, Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor write,  “From the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term even at the steepest personal and familial costs.” 

Donald Trump, the GOP, and the Heritage Foundation have a plan to mandate birth at any cost and they’ll set up a surveillance state to do it. It’s called Project 2025.

Read it. Resist it.

Vote accordingly.