Project 2025 Upends Reproductive Freedoms
Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: September 1, 2014
Publisher Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Publication: Freethought Newswire
Original Link: https://thehumanist.com/news/national/project-2025-upends-reproductive-freedoms
Publication Date: October 31, 2024
Organization: American Humanist Association
Organization Description: The mission of the American Humanist Association is to advance humanism, an ethical and life-affirming philosophy free of belief in any gods and other supernatural forces. Advocating for equality for nontheists and a society guided by reason, empathy, and our growing knowledge of the world, the AHA promotes a worldview that encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good.
By Lily Bolourian
By now, you’ve heard a lot from the American Humanist Association (and others!) about Project 2025 and many of the dangerous plans that the Christian Nationalist right have published to upend democracy. From calling for fascist immigration policies that would rip our neighbors from their homes, to dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, to greenlighting the further decimation of the environment, the plan is unquestionably dangerous and aims to marginalize huge portions of the population.
When it comes to reproductive freedom, abortion access, and the concept of family, Project 2025’s goals are inherently racist, fascist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.
Controlling reproduction is about much more than stripping away access to an inherent right such as abortion. It’s fundamentally about controlling the population in service of white supremacist aims. It’s about enforcing cis-hetero-patriarchy by determining what constitutes a family and what does not, who has the right to reproduce and who does not, and ensuring that marriage is between cisgender straight men and women only. It’s a full-scale attempt to roll back our freedoms and force white Christian Nationalist ideals on the masses.
White Christian Nationalists dream of a time when gender roles were strictly enforced, white men held all the rights, anything that deviated from the nuclear family was shunned, and morality was defined squarely by how closely an individual practices Christianity. Their aim is to promote a vision of the United States that is strictly white and Christian-centric to the detriment of pluralism, humanism, and anyone who does not fit into that narrow definition.
One does not need to dig throughout the plan to see that Christian Nationalist ideals form it—in the very foreword to the plan, Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts writes that one of the top four goals of the plan is to “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely” (p.3). This is folly when, in fact, our individual rights were never given to us at all but consistently fought for since the founding of our nation. Indeed, the Constitution omitted the use of the word “God” intentionally while bestowing the right to freedom of and from religion in the Bill of Rights.
Although they do not admit it, Christian Nationalists aim to codify whiteness by driving up the white birth rate while simultaneously promising to mass deport mostly non-white immigrants and their children. This type of fascist ideology is riddled throughout Project 2025 and supported by the vast majority of the conservative movement in the United States. They often argue that civil rights are counter to “religious liberty” or infringements upon the right to freely practice religion. That is, of course, a ridiculous assertion with no basis in reality and only intended to be a loose justification for violating the human rights of millions of people. Furthermore, on page 455 of Project 2025’s plan to ramp up monitoring of abortion data nationwide shows their desire to control the pregnancy outcomes of all who can gestate regardless of the individual laws of the states in which they live.
In order to turn back the clock, huge swaths of the population would be forced into subjugation and second-class status, or violently removed from the country. Project 2025 is not only a conservative playbook but a map that leads us directly into a theocracy. We’ve seen how the right will weaponize concepts such as “religious freedom” and “religious liberty” to thwart civil liberties. If given the opportunity, the right has written a game plan through Project 2025 for how to use the powers of the federal government to erode the secular nature of our Constitution in favor of a politicized view of Christianity that most Christians do not even support.
For example, on page 450 of Project 2025, it calls for radically transforming the Department of Health and Human Services and turning it against people who seek health care, from access to abortion to medical aid in dying: “The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.” This inappropriate injection of religious doctrine into public policy is not just an assault on the health care of pregnant people—it’s a direct attack on secularism, democracy, and democratic values.
Separation of religion from government is not a suggestion—it’s one of a handful of rights explicitly and intentionally written into the First Amendment to ensure a wall of separation always remains. This is due to the ways that a marriage between church and state harms the values of pluralism and hurts secular people and individuals from minority religions.
Humanists and the secular movement support the principles of bodily autonomy, individual freedoms, and evidence-based policymaking which run diametrically counter to the aims of Christian Nationalists to control all pregnancy outcomes in the United States and to criminalize patients, providers, and anyone who helps an individual obtain an abortion.
The only future that Project 2025 offers is a future dictated by far right ideological agendas over individual freedoms. The good news is that there is a better option than fascism—it is humanism. Humanists have mobilized across the country to fight back against Christian Nationalism. We still have the power to stop Project 2025 from ever being implemented through education, awareness, and the ballot box. It’s incumbent upon all of us to work together to defeat Christian Nationalism in all of its forms and to keep our institutions free from a hostile takeover that disproportionately threatens the livelihoods of the most marginalized people in our communities.
Tags: Project 2025Lily Bolourian is the Legal and Policy Director at the American Humanist Association. She is a seasoned strategist, policy wonk, and advocate with fifteen years of experience working and winning on issues related to abortion access, reproductive justice, immigration, police violence, and environmental justice. Prior to working with the AHA, Lily was the first woman of color in over thirty years to hold the title of Executive Director of Pro-Choice. She has also been Senior Legislative Aide to Montgomery County, MD Councilmember Will Jawando. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Health Law and Policy from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and a Bachelor of Arts in Government and International Politics from George Mason University.
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