Conservatives Must Not Care if Women Die.
Project 2025 Dispels the Terror in Store for Women if Trump Wins
I went to my home state of Texas recently to visit family. Sitting around a formal dining table, my uncle relayed a story I’d never heard before about my great grandmother, Mae.
“The mother who raised her wasn’t her biological mother,” he said. “Her biological mother died when she was six.”
Mae’s mother, my great-great grandmother, had trouble in her pregnancy that couldn’t be diagnosed in the early 1900s. She developed some kind of blood infection and died while Mae was at home with her alone.
Isn’t it strange that this unspeakable tragedy became the stuff of family lore? With enough distance, past traumas are dulled into dinner table talk.
Mine was a family of sharecroppers, too poor to afford more than a dirt floor in the early 1900s. These were the days before phones or health care plans, before the days of prenatal pills or ambulances. I shuddered, thinking about my own young daughter, wondering if she would know what to do if I were expiring before her eyes.
“What a cautionary tale,” I said, looking directly into the faces of my conservative family members. “Let’s not go back to a time that was common.”
There isn’t a single woman on this planet who doesn’t know that pregnancy can kill, but that hasn’t stopped the GOP from their wholesale assault on essential, life-saving women’s health care.
Those destructive sadists would rather see women die than give women an inch of autonomy over our own bodies.
Abortion is health care. Full stop. I don’t mince words because mincing words isn’t doing us any favors. It’s causing people to remain woefully uninformed about what’s at stake. Confusion and information fatigue are tools right-wing extremists use to normalize nightmares.
And it is confusing. Try to wrap your head around the ever-changing patchwork of abortion laws that blanket the country now that federal protections have disappeared. Abortion is completely illegal — with very few exceptions — in 14 states. Many states have gestational limitations. Other states allow abortions in any and all circumstances.
For example, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed a bill that bans abortion at 12-weeks.
But in neighboring Colorado, no ban exists with no cut-off date for gestation. Similarly, in New Mexico abortion is completely unregulated, which angers Texas, the state with arguably the strictest and most deadly abortion laws. Many counties in Texas have even tried to enact a travel ban, attempting to catch women heading out on state highways to have an abortion in New Mexico.
This is — essentially — a travel ban.
And in case you’re wondering, no, Texas does not allow women to terminate a pregnancy EVEN TO SAVE HER OWN LIFE. Kate Cox, the reluctant poster mother for medically necessary abortion, learned that the hard way when she found out that continuing her pregnancy could be fatal. After losing her case at the Texas Supreme Court, Cox had to be rushed to another state to have an abortion in order to save her life and future chances of conceiving.
Despite all of these horrors I’ve just shared, I need to tell you that this is just the beginning if the proposals in Project 2025 become policies.
Remember that Project 2025 is right-wing extremists’ playbook to overthrow the government and turn it into an authoritarian theocracy under Trump. Paul Dans, the Heritage Foundation’s director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, believes that if he is elected, the government will essentially be Trump’s private corporation — to fire and hire employees at will. The plan includes gutting entire departments and replacing those workers with sycophants who will do their exact bidding, and they are already screening them on Project2025.org.
Project 2025 promises the “Dobbs decision was just the beginning” and that a nation-wide abortion ban is in store.
It states that women who find themselves in “immensely difficult and often tragic situations” should be willing to demonstrate their “heroism” by becoming mothers.
Project 2025 will scrub references to the words “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual reproductive rights” from all federal websites.
Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, on Page 265 it claims that banning abortion will not negatively affect women’s maternal health.
Project 2025 demands that the FDA outlaw mifepristone and misopristol, two abortion medications that have been used administered safely and effectively for two decades.
It will disallow women in the military from having an abortion under any circumstances.
Typing out this laundry list of horrors, I can’t help but think of Mae and how desperate she must have felt to save her mother’s life. I wonder if I carry her trauma with me, passed in DNA from generation to generation. How many of your mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers have similar stories buried in black and white family photos?
We can’t go back and change the course of history, but we can fight to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Fighting against Project 2025 isn’t just how we save women’s rights. It’s how we SAVE WOMEN.
Onward Democracy Defenders!