Reminder: JD Vance made clear a Trump-Vance administration would defund reproductive health care services if given the chance

As the Trump-Vance ticket seeks to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides over 2 million contraceptive services for Americans annually, DNC Spokesperson Aida Ross released the following statement:

“Donald Trump and JD Vance would gut access to contraception for hundreds of thousands of Americans as part of their extreme Project 2025 plans to defund Planned Parenthood. Vance skipped a vote to protect contraception access earlier this year before later admitting a Trump-Vance ticket would cut off funding for Planned Parenthood if given the chance. Trump and Vance are making it clear they will put their dangerous Project 2025 agenda over the health and rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans who access these services every year.”

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans support Planned Parenthood, which provides millions of contraceptive services for Americans across the country.  

Planned Parenthood: “More than three-fourths of Americans (77%) have a favorable view of Planned Parenthood, with the strongest support among women, adults under 35, and Black, Latino, and AAPI communities.”

Planned Parenthood 2022-2023 Annual Report: “Breakdown of Affiliate Medical Services”

“Contraceptive Services: 2,250,913”

Donald Trump and JD Vance’s Project 2025 agenda would gut access to contraception by defunding Planned Parenthood — something Vance himself confirmed last week — and Medicaid. 

Vance: “On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood…our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late term abortions. That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around, it will remain a consistent view.”

Project 2025, page 471: “Prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds…Policymakers should end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.” 

Project 2025, page 472: “HHS should… 1) Issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans. 2) Propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion from the Medicaid program. Congress should pass the Protecting Life and Taxpayers Act, which would accomplish the goal of defunding abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood.” 

Project 2025, page 491: “Congress should complement these efforts by passing legislation such as the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act,78 which would prohibit family planning grants from going to entities that perform abortions or provide funding to other entities that perform abortions.”

KFF: “While in office, Trump’s Administration rewrote the rules governing the federal Title X program, the federal family planning program that supports contraceptive access for people with lower incomes.

“Former President Trump allowed federal Medicaid funds to be used in a Texas Medicaid program that excluded Planned Parenthood and did not cover the full range of contraceptives, excluding emergency contraception. Eliminating Planned Parenthood from Medicaid provider networks has long been a priority of some Republican lawmakers and conservative organizations and is reiterated by Project 2025.”

Joe Kernen, CNBC: “Have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?”

Trump: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.”

Trump proposed cuts to Medicaid every year in office and his administration’s “gag rule” defunded hundreds of Title X clinics, disqualifying providers like Planned Parenthood from providing care under the program. 

In his FY18, FY19, FY20, and FY21 budgets, Trump repeatedly proposed hundreds of billions in cuts to Medicaid.

HHS: “Title X services are voluntary, confidential, and provided regardless of one’s ability to pay. For many clients, Title X clinics are their only ongoing source of health care and health education.

“Title X recipients provide a broad range of medically approved family planning services, which includes all Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved contraceptive products and natural family planning methods for clients.”

Politico: “Planned Parenthood serves about 1.6 million of the roughly 4 million low-income women who depend on Title X clinics for free and subsidized care.”

Guttmacher Institute: “Based on data available for 910 of those 981 sites, we estimate that these changes reduced the network’s capacity to provide women with contraceptive services by at least 46%, translating to roughly 1.6 million patients. In other words, the impact of the gag rule on the network’s capacity is much greater than it might appear when looking at clinic numbers alone, because the gag rule intentionally targeted clinics specializing in reproductive health care services, sites that also serve the highest volume of contraceptive patients.

“Contextualizing the attack on Title X in the larger conservative agenda to cut reproductive health care and health care writ large, such as past attempts to chip away at Medicaid via block grants and systemically defund abortion providers, paints an even more dire picture of patients’ dwindling options.”

REALITY CHECK: Attacks on reproductive freedoms, like Trump and Vance’s anti-choice Project 2025 agenda to defund Planned Parenthood, are wildly unpopular.

Planned Parenthood: “Three-fourths of Americans (74%) would be concerned about the loss of affordable reproductive health and preventive care services if Planned Parenthood no longer existed.”

USA Today: “Americans overwhelmingly oppose the next goal of many anti-abortion activists, to enact a federal law banning abortion nationwide. By 80%-14%, those surveyed opposed that idea, including 65% of Republicans and 83% of independents.”

Axios: “Record share of U.S. voters back abortion rights and will vote on it: Gallup”

NBC News: “Abortion rights have won in every election since Roe v. Wade was overturned”

Axios: “There’s widespread support for letting women obtain drugs for medication abortion from their doctor or a clinic, with 72% supporting — including half of Republicans.”

The Trump-Vance ticket and their Project 2025 allies are pushing a dangerous Project 2025 agenda that would ban abortion nationwide, threaten access to IVF and contraception, and rip away reproductive freedoms.

Rolling Stone: “Trump Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide: Report”

CNN: “JD Vance said in 2022 he ‘would like abortion to be illegal nationally’”

“During a podcast interview in January 2022, then-candidate JD Vance said he ‘certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally’ and was ‘sympathetic’ to the view that a national ban was necessary to stop women from traveling across states to obtain an abortion.”

Washington Post: “Vance urged DOJ to enforce Comstock Act, crack down on abortion pills”

New Republic: “On January 20, 2025, conservatives plan to resurrect a 150-year-old defunct law to ban abortion across the nation. This is not a secret plan—far from it. It’s part of the 180-Day Playbook produced by Project 2025, detailing priorities for an incoming conservative president on day one.” 

Politico: “Anti-abortion advocates worked for five decades to topple Roe v. Wade. They’re now laying the groundwork for a yearslong fight to curb in vitro fertilization.

“Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have been strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.”

The 19th: “RNC approves platform that would give rights to fetuses, endangering abortion, IVF” 

“Fetal personhood is widely seen as being in conflict with in vitro fertilization (IVF), which creates embryos outside of the uterus that are later implanted. Fetal personhood bestows the same rights currently reserved for people to embryos from the moment of fertilization.”

Reproductive Freedom for All: “The extensive mandate calls to gut reproductive freedom, including effectively banning medication abortion, ending access to emergency abortion care, attacking contraception, deploying fetal personhood, and undermining IVF in federal policy…

“Project 2025 includes personhood language and policies that propagate the belief that life begins at conception—which could have devastating impacts should it be put into law. This so-called “personhood” language could ban not only abortion but also some forms of birth control and assisted fertility treatments like IVF.”

The Nation: “Project 2025 Has Bad Medicine for HHS”

“And by declaring that life begins at conception, his manifesto appears to commit HHS to finding ways to outlaw IVF, which relies on generating multiple embryos, most of which are not implanted.”

Rolling Stone: “Inside the MAGA Plan to Attack Birth Control, Surveil Women and Ban the Abortion Pill”

Vance: “I’ve reviewed a lot of [Project 2025]. There are some good ideas in there.”

Axios: “[Project 2025] is undeniably a Trump-driven operation.”