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 hundreds of thousands of primary, preventive, and telehealth care visits annually, DNC Spokesperson Aida Ross released the following statement:

“From check-ups to flu vaccines to diabetes treatments, Planned Parenthood provides thousands of Americans with access to affordable primary and preventive care — but the Trump-Vance ticket wants to defund it all. Through their dangerous Project 2025 agenda, Donald Trump and JD Vance would slash funding to Planned Parenthood and leave thousands of people out in the cold, unable to access the basic care they need. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have made it clear: under their administration, our freedoms and our health care will always be protected.”

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans support Planned Parenthood, which provides hundreds of thousands of primary, preventive, and telehealth care appointments for Americans across the country every year.

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: 

“Telehealth Appointments in 2022: 123,855

“Primary Care Visits: 70,945

“Preventive Care Visits: 129,216”

Donald Trump and JD Vance’s Project 2025 agenda would gut these services by defunding Planned Parenthood — something Vance himself confirmed last week.

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.”

Nearly four million Americans access health care through Title X clinics. The Trump administration’s “gag rule” defunded hundreds of Title X clinics, disqualifying providers like Planned Parenthood from providing health care under the program — including for about 1.6 million low-income women. 

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.”

Columbia Mailman School of Public Health: “Since 1970 [Title X] has supported the provision of comprehensive family planning and preventive health services for low-income individuals who are uninsured or underinsured. Title X funding benefits some of the most marginalized communities: women, low-income individuals, young people, LGBTQIA+.”

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: “[T]he Trump administration’s domestic ‘gag rule’ has slashed the Title X national family planning network’s patient capacity in half, jeopardizing care for 1.6 million female patients nationwide […] roughly one in every four Title X service sites left the network in 2019 because of the domestic gag rule, shorthand for restrictive regulations that prohibit—among other things—referrals for abortion care. In 2019, an estimated 981 U.S. clinics receiving Title X funding—approximately one-quarter of all sites that received Title X funding as of June 2019—likely left the Title X network because of the gag rule […]”

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. Title X funds have never been used to pay for abortion services, but Trump’s Administration rewrote the regulations to disqualify family planning clinics from participating in the program if they also offered abortion services (with separate funding) […] These changes resulted in a reduction of about 1,300 of the 4,000 sites participating in the network of clinics receiving federal support from the Title X program.” 

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.”