Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a new Trump administration penned by dozens of right-wing organizations — and especially its hard-line anti-abortion proposals.
In the lead-up to the Republican convention, many credulously lauded Trump for “softening” or “moderating” the GOP platform on the issue, despite the fact that the platform proposes fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights.
Trump said that Project 2025 went “way too far” on abortion in a Fox News interview filmed over the weekend in Mar-a-Lago, prior to the attempt on his life. But just hours after the interview aired on Monday morning, Trump announced his pick for running mate: Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a man with a recent history of strong opposition to abortion whose selection was celebrated by anti-abortion groups like Students for Life Action.
In the past 48 hours, Vance has tried to backpedal on his abortion stances, including by scrubbing an “END ABORTION” section on his Senate campaign website, which now redirects to a fundraising page for the Trump-Vance ticket. Until he got the nod, this site succinctly distilled Vance’s “100 percent pro-life” views:
Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family. The historic Dobbs decision puts this new era of society into motion, one that prioritizes family and the sanctity of all life.
Vance’s views on abortion thus track with one of Project 2025’s most basic proposals: that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.” Between Trump’s platform, Vance’s track record, and Vance’s ties to those leading Project 2025, the Trump campaign’s attempts to distinguish their own platform from the Project 2025 anti-abortion agenda are growing increasingly implausible.
Fetuses and the 14th Amendment
In past presidential election cycles, the GOP platform devoted multiple pages to various anti-abortion proposals, including appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and enacting a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Trump advocated when the House passed such a ban in 2017.
The concept of fetal personhood — that fetuses and embryos should have the same constitutional rights as people — has long been at the heart of the GOP’s anti-abortion plank. But past platforms envisioned passing a “human life amendment” to the Constitution and related legislation.
When the Republican National Committee unveiled the draft platform last week, it had just four sentences on abortion. Since the national 20-week ban was dropped, many commentators interpreted the platform as softening the party’s stance on abortion.
Abortion opponents, however, celebrated one sentence, in particular, which was approved by a voice vote of GOP delegates on Monday: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”
Far from moderating on abortion, the GOP platform now suggests that fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights — without the need for any new laws or amendments. This aligns neatly with Project 2025’s roadmap and Vance’s views.
Notably, the platform refers to the constitutional rights of the “person” under the 14th Amendment, rather than the rights of the “unborn,” as prior platforms phrased it.
“To people in the know, the reference to every person being entitled to due process will bring to mind the idea of fetal personhood and suggest that the GOP will pursue it,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian, wrote on X after the draft platform came out.
Plenty of anti-abortion organizations certainly read it that way and thus endorsed the revised language.
“It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, in a statement.
“The most significant contribution that the GOP platform makes for LIFE comes in celebrating the fact that the 14th Amendment ‘guarantees’ legal protection for the preborn,” said Students for Life Action’s Kristan Hawkins in a similarly triumphant statement.
“It is proper and good to recognize every life, including those in the womb, share the distinct protections gained by those that have given so much and found as a guarantee within the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” Americans United for Life wrote in its analysis of the draft platform.
As Erika Bachiochi, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank argued in the wake of the Dobbs decision, getting courts to recognize fetuses as full “persons” under the law and Constitution is “the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.”
“The Republican party has now decided that the Constitution already protects fetal personhood,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas law professor who studies reproductive rights and religion. “They’re going to take the view that fetuses have full constitutional rights.”
“The RNC platform attempting to walk back its extremist positions on abortion is irrelevant,” said Sabrina Talukder, director of the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress, “because Project 2025 will ensure abortion is banned everywhere.”
Both Sepper and Talukder pointed to a ruling in February from the Alabama state Supreme Court as an example of the fetal personhood legal strategy in action. The Alabama court ruled frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization were “children” under a 19th-century wrongful death statute, and it cited the Dobbs decision for the idea that “unborn children” have “civil rights.”
Trump-Vance on Project 2025 and Abortion
In his Fox News interview, Trump said abortion “will never be a federal issue again.” But if, as the GOP platform suggests, fetuses and embryos already have constitutional rights, the federal government arguably has a mandate to protect those rights and restrict abortion. And Project 2025 lays out a road map to doing so using federal regulatory processes.
The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the entire Project 2025 manifesto, while the Biden campaign quickly labeled Trump and Vance “the Project 2025 ticket.” The playbook was drafted and edited by many in Trump’s camp, including numerous former Trump administration officials.
Before getting the nod from Trump, Vance told Newsmax that he had “reviewed a lot of” Project 2025 and found a mix of “good ideas” plus “some things I disagree with,” without further specifying which were good and bad.
In the foreword to the 900-page playbook, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urges the “next conservative administration” to “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life.”
When Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, Roberts called him a “good friend” that he was “privately really rooting for.” Earlier this year, Roberts said Vance was “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.”
Vance is also a member of the Teneo Network, an invite-only conservative social group which is on the Project 2025 advisory board. In a private speech to Teneo members in 2021, Vance praised recently enacted abortion restrictions in Texas — S.B. 8, the abortion “bounty hunter law” — despite “the legal technicalities about whether that law is ultimately going to survive legal challenges.”
The “existing federal powers” available to restrict abortion, according to Project 2025’s more detailed chapters, include the Comstock Act, a sweepingly broad anti-vice law passed in 1873 that bans mailing materials “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” The Biden Justice Department has interpreted the Comstock Act to prohibit mailing abortion-related materials only when the sender knows they will be used for an illegal abortion, but this interpretation is not binding on future administrations.
Last year, a coalition of Republican attorneys general letters sent letters to CVS and Walgreens warning that sending abortion pills by mail violates the Comstock Act. One of the architects of the conservative legal strategy against abortion, Jonathan Mitchell, told the New York Times that he hopes Trump and anti-abortion groups would “keep their mouths shut as much as possible” about the Comstock Act until the election.
Project 2025 invokes the Comstock Act in the same way, in two chapters drafted by former Trump administration officials. The Justice Department chapter proposes “a campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” in the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.”
“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” writes Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of America First Legal, who drafted the Justice Department chapter and served in the Trump DOJ. “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.”
“Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to push a radical extremist agenda and outlines ways to create a backdoor national abortion ban by misapplying the Comstock Act,” Talukder, of the Center for American Progress, told The Intercept, “bypassing having to pass a national abortion ban in Congress or through an executive order.”
The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about their views on using the Comstock Act to restrict abortion pills.
The Project 2025 chapter about the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, also cites the Comstock Act. The FDA should stop “promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” according to Roger Severino, who wrote the chapter and served as the HHS head of civil rights enforcement under Trump.
Severino also argues that the FDA should “reverse its approval” of abortion medications like mifepristone, and that one morning-after emergency contraceptive, Ella, should be removed from mandatory insurance coverage because it is a “potential abortifacient.” In a post to X, Project 2025 claimed the manifesto “says nothing about banning or restricting contraception.”
The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about mifepristone and Ella.
Earlier this month, Vance caught flak from anti-abortion groups for saying he supported the Supreme Court’s decision dismissing a court challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Once Trump chose Vance as his VP pick, however, other abortion opponents downplayed the remark as part of a “left-leaning gotcha interview” on “Meet The Press” and thus insufficient to draw “too broad a conclusion about Vance’s abortion advocacy.”
But in his Teneo speech in 2021, Vance made his “abortion advocacy” clear. Praising Texas S.B. 8 — which prohibits abortions as early as six weeks, when the embryo is the size of a pea — Vance called it “a law that protects the rights of the unborn.” Like Project 2025 and the GOP platform, Vance believes fetuses and embryos already have rights that need protecting.