ICYMI: Pregnancy Surveillance One of the Most Unpopular Parts of Trump and Vance’s Toxic Project 2025 Agenda
August 2, 2024
Trump and Vance’s Project 2025 agenda not only includes banning abortion nationwide, threatening doctors with jail time, and restricting access to contraception, but it calls for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and pregnancy loss from medical treatments such as chemo to be reported to the federal government under a Trump-Vance administration. That’s on top of the post-Dobbs reality where, because of Trump, prosecutors can now legally go after reproductive health data in mobile apps to enforce draconian anti-abortion laws.
In recent polling that showed Project 2025 policies’ unfavorability surging since June, voters ranked monitoring pregnancies among the most unpopular and harmful policies in Trump and Vance’s extreme Project 2025 agenda. This November, they’ll make clear that creeps like Trump and Vance have no place in our doctors offices or digging through our health data.
The latest headlines about the Trump-Vance ticket’s Project 2025 plans to surveil women’s pregnancies:
HuffPost: How A Trump-Vance Presidency Might Allow The Government To Monitor Pregnancies
Key Point: “There is evidence that, if elected, Trump and his vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), would permit or even encourage the type of Orwellian surveillance described in Project 2025. For one, Trump has already expressed clear disinterest in preventing conservative states from enacting draconian policies on abortion and pregnancy.”
Rolling Stone: Trump and Vance Have Backed States That Want to Surveil Pregnant Women
Key Point: “Trump and his vice presidential pick are now both saying abortion should be left up to the states, even though they both previously signaled support for national bans. They have also, alarmingly, both suggested they would be OK with states moving to surveil women’s pregnancies. […] Vance, an Ohio senator, has gone further. Last summer, he signed onto a congressional letter calling on the Biden administration to withdraw a draft rule designed to prevent police in states with abortion bans from using personal health information to track and potentially charge people who travel to other states for abortion care.”
The Independent: Project 2025 abortion surveillance idea comes back to bite Trump
Key Point: “He has also endorsed any conservative state government push to monitor womens’ pregnancies in past interviews. In two separate instances this year, Trump implied that he would not oppose any Republican push to level such surveillance against pregnant women.”
Jezebel: Noted Weirdos J.D. Vance & Donald Trump Want to Surveil Pregnant Patients, In Case They Get an Abortion
Key Point: “In 2023, J.D. Vance signed a letter that said doctors should have to provide police with patients’ private medical data, so police can investigate whether someone traveled out-of-state for abortion care….
“In 2021, Vance argued that if the Supreme Court overturned Roe, ‘Black women’ in Ohio would too easily be able to travel to California for abortions—a national ban would be necessary to stop this interstate abortion travel. Three years later, Vance is on a Republican presidential ticket that’s been armed with a detailed plan to monitor and ban abortion across the country.”
Spectrum News, Nationwide: Democrats aim to link Vance to Project 2025 over calls for government surveillance of abortion care
Key Point: “Vance has a more explicit history of supporting the expansion of government surveillance of women’s reproductive health care. Just weeks after arriving in Washington in January 2023, he cosponsored legislation that would hold Medicaid funding for family planning services hostage until states provided abortion data so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could “maintain a surveillance system to collect aggregate data in a standardized format on abortions in the United States,” including the gestational age of the fetus, maternal race and ethnicity, abortion type, maternal marital status and the previous pregnancies of the mother, including the number of previous abortions.”
Mother Jones: JD Vance Has Supported Criminalizing People Seeking Abortions
Key Point: “Ohio Sen. JD Vance has previously argued against abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest, supported the use of the Comstock Act to criminalize sending abortion medications in the mail, and called for a national abortion ban. ‘I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,’ Vance said on a podcast in 2022 when running for the Senate.
“Add to that his recent support for the use of patients’ medical records by the police to investigate people who travel out of state for abortions. In a letter sent in June 2023 to the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Vance and 29 other Republican lawmakers urged HHS to reverse course on its recently finalized rule that protected patients’ reproductive healthcare information from law enforcement, particularly when patients travel to access lawful abortion care.”
Trump and his MAGA cronies are already trying to spin their terrifying agenda to hide the Project 2025 blueprint that would guide his second term agenda. Here’s an overview of their real plans to rip away women’s reproductive freedom and right to privacy:
MSNBC: “Trump has been scrambling to distance himself from Project 2025, the policy project organized by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, designed to help guide a future Trump presidency. Republicans appear to be letting accusations that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, and other right-wingers are ‘weird’ get under their skin. And some top Republicans are apprehensive about Trump’s and Vance’s bigoted attacks on Harris over her racial identity and gender.”
Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, p. 458:“FDA should … Reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start. … Now that the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the Constitution contains no right to an abortion, the FDA is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval, which was premised on pregnancy being an ‘illness’ and abortion being ‘therapeutically’ effective at treating this ‘illness.’ The FDA is statutorily charged with guaranteeing the safety and efficacy of drugs and therefore should withdraw this drug that is proven to be dangerous to women and by definition fatally unsafe for unborn children.”
Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, p. 497: “OCR should withdraw its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidance on abortion. OCR should withdraw its June 2022 guidance that purports to address patient privacy concerns following the Dobbs decision but is actually a politicized statement in favor of abortion and against Dobbs. HIPAA covers patients in the womb, but this guidance treats them as nonpersons contrary to law. The guidance is unnecessary and contributes to ideologically motivated fearmongering about abortion after Dobbs.”
Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, p. 562:“Announcing a Campaign to Enforce the Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462 Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail. Federal law prohibits mailing ‘[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.’ Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute. The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.”
Comments on Proposed Rule: HIPAA Privacy Rule To Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy: “We write to express our concern regarding the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed rule, ‘HIPAA Privacy Rule To Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy,’ 88 Fed. Reg. 23506 published on April 17, 2023 (the ‘Proposed Rule’), and to urge you to withdraw it immediately.
“Abortion is not health care—it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women. Congress did not authorize HHS to extend special provisions for abortion such as these under the guise of ‘health care.’ The Proposed Rule unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers, and directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants.
“The Proposed Rule creates special protections for abortion that limit cooperation with law enforcement, undermine the ability to report abuse, restrict the provision of public health information, and erase the humanity of unborn children…
“Sincerely,… J.D. Vance United States Senator”