Your Body is a Battleground // Part Four: Project 2025 a threat to reproductive healthcare

Editor’s note: This article is the last in our series about attempts to restrict access to birth control, both in Oklahoma and across the nation. The series looked at our country’s fragile legal justification for contraceptive access, the historical oppression of women, the health risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth, and what could be in store for reproductive healthcare access if we stay on the current political course. Click the links to read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

October 11, 2024‍

Depending on the outcome of this year’s presidential election, major changes to federal reproductive health policy could be forthcoming.

Project 2025 is the now infamous brainchild of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Published as a blueprint for a possible second Trump administration, its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise would impose more restrictions upon the reproductive healthcare landscape by making policy changes within the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

These changes would strive to make the United States a place where “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children,” form the basis for a “well-ordered nation and healthy society.” A review of Project 2025’s coalition partners revealed dozens of conservative organizations that have “expressed their disapproval of and intent to restrict contraceptive care access,” according to Media Matters for America, a research nonprofit that analyzes political misinformation in U.S. media.

The recommendations that Project 2025 makes for HHS include:

• Mandatory reporting of abortion statistics by states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;

• Prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding;

• Rescinding Obamacare mandates that contraception be covered under health insurance plans, including emergency contraception;

• Restructuring the federal Title X family planning program to include “fertility awareness and holistic family planning;”

• Mandating that family planning clinics that receive Title X funding provide patients information about the importance of heterosexual marriage and family; and,

• Restoring Title X funding to states that have banned abortion (including Oklahoma).

More than one hundred conservative advocacy groups participated in the formation of Project 2025, and many of them have called for drastic rollbacks to reproductive healthcare access, according to Media Matters for America. Those calls include public attacks on in vitro fertilization (IVF), anti-surrogacy arguments, misinformation about how certain contraceptive methods work, and enforcement of the Comstock Act, a federal law passed in 1873 that criminalizes the involvement of the United States Postal Service to deliver obscene or crime-inciting materials, or certain abortion-related materials.

For example, during a 2023 episode of a podcast titled Heritage Explains, Emma Waters, a senior research associate at The Heritage Foundation, said that “for women who have been on birth control for a long time, it can impact your fertility.” One of the side effects of hormonal birth control is that it “actually tells your body that it’s pregnant all the time,” Waters said.

These and other misleading statements about birth control simply are not true, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). “Spreading misinformation about any kind of contraceptive is dangerous. Misinformation about hormonal birth control interferes with the public’s understanding of how it works, increases the risk of incorrect use, and may lead to support for legislation that threatens the availability of safe and effective birth control options,” reported ACOG in a May 2024 advocacy statement. “Myths and misinformation about birth control—for example, that it affects libido and sexual attraction; leads to mood changes; creates hormonal imbalances; affects future fertility; increases risks of transmitting sexually transmitted infections, or STIs; or causes abortion—have no basis in clinical data and are often spread by people who do not have any medical education or training. These myths frighten people away from well-studied, clinically proven, safe, and effective choices that can improve their health and their lives.”

Conclusion

Throughout this series, we have discussed direct attacks on birth control access by some lawmakers at the Oklahoma State Capitol. To be fair, many legislators, Republican and Democrat, have supported bills that would protect birth control access, including SB 368, filed during the 2023 session. “Being pro-family also means allowing Oklahomans the freedom to plan when to start or grow their family,” said Senator Jessica Garvin, one of the bill authors. “When people have access to contraception, they can pursue their goals and build healthy families. It’s a right we all deserve.”

Other states have also joined the trend of limiting access to contraception, with many advocates using misinformation (that hormonal birth control causes abortions), to rally pro-life voters and politicians to their side. All this is happening while ten states will vote this November on ballot measures that would establish a right to reproductive healthcare access.

The legal argument used to protect fundamental rights such as healthcare autonomy, the “substantive due process” principle found in the Fifth and Fourteen Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, is now in a precarious position as it was invalidated by the United States Supreme Court when the court overturned legal precedents set fifty years ago protecting a woman’s right to seek an abortion. Substantive due process is the legal lynchpin in several other Supreme Court rulings, including the right to birth control. Given the court’s current makeup, other fundamental rights could soon fall by the wayside.

Without proper access to birth control, women face more negative health outcomes and career obstacles. Vulnerable populations are even more at risk when faced with limited contraception options.

Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a potential second Trump presidency, would radically change the federal Department of Health and Human Services, placing emphasis on families, married couples, and children, rather than preventing teen pregnancy and helping women receive the healthcare they need.

In summary, don’t take the fundamental right to birth control for granted. Powerful and influential people across the nation and in Oklahoma are working to deny that right. How do you stop them? Engage in our democratic and political processes. Vote. Have substantive conversations with friends and family members about the issues you feel are important. Support candidates who relate to you. Did we say vote?

The issue of birth control access is one of freedom, of people living their lives as they see fit. In their dissenting opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, U.S. Supreme Court justices Stephen Breyer (who retired in 2022), Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan made plain this notion: “Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women— to make their own choices and chart their own futures. Or at least, we did once.”

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