That is half one in a three-part sequence about Undertaking 2025, the extremist blueprint for the subsequent Republican president that maps out the everlasting reversal of greater than 50 years of hard-fought features for American ladies and ladies. Right here’s how it will play out.
Components two and three will drop Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, respectively, and can seem right here. Half two of the “Misogynist Manifesto” sequence will break down Undertaking 2025’s plans to intestine ladies’s rights within the office and the classroom. Half three will deal with the right-wing imaginative and prescient to “rip and shred” the federal authorities and democracy as we all know it.
You’ve in all probability heard in regards to the Heritage Basis’s detailed plan for the subsequent Republican president. Referred to as the Undertaking 2025 Presidential Transition Undertaking (and funded by the darkish cash networks affiliated with Leonard Leo and Charles Koch), the plan maps out the way to reverse greater than 50 years of features for American ladies and ladies in employment, schooling, reproductive rights and extra.
The venture has 4 pillars: an 887-page coverage agenda, a personnel data-base of vetted conservatives, a “presidential administration academy” to coach these preselected people to realize the Undertaking 2025 coverage agenda, and a 180-day “playbook”—what the plan’s backers hope to realize within the first 180 days if Donald Trump takes workplace once more in January 2025.
In response to Undertaking 2025, “It’s not sufficient for conservatives to win elections. If we’re going to rescue the nation from the grip of the unconventional Left, we’d like each a governing agenda and the correct folks in place, prepared to hold this agenda out on Day One of many subsequent conservative Administration.”
To develop this scheme, the Heritage Basis organized an advisory board with representatives from greater than 100 conservative organizations—a who’s who of teams which have led assaults on ladies’s rights over the previous half century, from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Discussion board to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the plaintiffs within the Supreme Courtroom instances that overturned Roe v. Wade and sought to ban abortion capsules nationwide.
In his foreword, Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Basis president, makes clear that dismantling ladies’s rights is central to Undertaking 2025’s coverage agenda.
“The subsequent conservative President should make the establishments of American civil society onerous targets for woke tradition warriors,” he writes. “This begins with deleting the phrases sexual orientation and gender id (“SOGI”), variety, fairness, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender fairness, gender consciousness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive well being, reproductive rights, and another time period used to deprive People of their First Modification rights out of each federal rule, company regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of laws that exists.”
Selling the Patriarchal Household and ‘Biblically-Based mostly Marriage’
Undertaking 2025 promotes conventional heterosexual marriage, stigmatizing single parenthood and same-sex spouses, and reducing packages to help single moms and their kids. It directs the subsequent president to develop insurance policies and packages to “keep a biblically primarily based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and household.”
The doc explains: “For the sake of kid well-being, packages ought to affirm that kids require and deserve each the love and nurturing of a mom and the play and safety of a father,” reflecting slim and antiquated concepts of parenting.
The Christian fundamentalist concept of a “biblically primarily based marriage” units males as breadwinners and leaders within the household, whereas ladies are subordinate to their husbands and serve them as caregivers of youngsters.
Undertaking 2025 directs the secretary of the Division of Well being and Human Companies to reverse the company’s deal with fairness, “subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, changing such insurance policies with these encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear households.”
To strain single moms to marry, the authors advocate redirecting Title X household planning funding away from reproductive healthcare and requiring healthcare employees to “present data to prospects in regards to the significance of marriage to household and private well-being.”
To strain single fathers to marry, the plan directs the federal government to “prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, well being, and welfare insurance policies.” Learn how to assist the one in 4 ladies who expertise extreme home violence by the hands of males is nowhere talked about in Undertaking 2025’s coverage agenda.
To economically coerce marriage, although, the plan recommends redirecting baby welfare funding towards marriage and relationship schooling and redirecting welfare {dollars} within the Short-term Help for Needy Households (TANF) program—which Congress supposed for moms and kids residing in poverty—towards selling “marriage, wholesome household formation, and delaying intercourse to stop being pregnant.”
To make single parenting tougher, the plan recommends including work necessities for single mother and father receiving any non money profit value $50 monthly for six consecutive months, together with TANF. It doesn’t advocate elevating the minimal wage or supporting the creation of extra living-wage jobs.
On childcare, Undertaking 2025 requires “prioritizing funding for home-based childcare, not common childcare,” and it recommends eliminating Head Begin, the critically vital early childhood schooling program for low-income kids. The plan notably doesn’t help paid parental go away legal guidelines.
The flip away from ladies’s rights and towards home roles for girls is probably greatest mirrored in Undertaking 2025’s advice to rename the USAID Workplace of Gender Equality and Ladies’s Empowerment to be the “USAID Workplace of Ladies, Youngsters, and Households.”
Destroying Reproductive Rights
Proposals to limit reproductive rights pervade Undertaking 2025’s coverage agenda, centered not solely on abortion but additionally on contraception, intercourse schooling and gender-affirming healthcare.
The plan would remove the Reproductive Healthcare Entry Activity Power throughout the Division of Well being and Human Companies and substitute it with the “Division of Life” to remove help for reproductive rights all through the federal authorities.
On abortion, Undertaking 2025 calls on the subsequent president to direct the Meals and Drug Administration to reverse approval of the abortion tablet mifepristone (now utilized in 63 % of all abortions) and to ban telehealth abortion (used for practically one-fifth of abortions within the U.S.). Undertaking 2025 directs the Division of Justice to misuse an 1873 anti-obscenity legislation, the Comstock Act, to criminally prosecute anybody who mails abortion capsules and doubtlessly any medical instrument utilized in procedural abortion—successfully establishing a nationwide ban on abortion.
The authors name for the reversal of a Biden administration coverage that requires hospitals to supply abortions in medical emergencies no matter state bans, and affirms healthcare employees’ “proper of conscience” to disclaim medical care. Undertaking 2025 would additionally withdraw Biden administration steering defending the privateness of abortion sufferers underneath the Well being Insurance coverage Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Concerning clinic entry, Undertaking 2025 directs the Division of Justice to finish enforcement of the 1994 Freedom of Entry to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act in opposition to violent antiabortion protesters and as an alternative direct its assets towards defending antiabortion “disaster being pregnant facilities” that dispense misinformation and disinformation to bully ladies into persevering with undesirable pregnancies.
On abortion funding, the plan calls on Congress to make everlasting the Hyde and Weldon amendments that block federal funding for abortion and to trace states’ compliance with these legal guidelines. It requires the withdrawal of Medicaid funds from states that require insurance coverage protection for abortion and would require states to trace and port all abortions to the federal authorities.
Moreover, Undertaking 2025 would bar federal funds, together with Medicaid, from any healthcare group that gives abortions, and remove all federal funding for Deliberate Parenthood. It will additionally reinstate an expanded world gag rule barring nongovernmental organizations overseas that obtain U.S. assist from offering, referring or advocating for authorized abortion. And it will reverse the Biden administration coverage of supporting ladies touring out of state for abortion care.
Federal funding for analysis that may help abortion rights can be eradicated, and the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention can be required to trace “abortion throughout numerous demographic indicators to evaluate whether or not sure populations are focused by abortion suppliers,” referring to the right-wing lie that abortion suppliers goal ladies primarily based on race. It will additionally finish all stem cell analysis.
Undertaking 2025 requires growing insurance policies to oppose surrogacy, however has no plans for reducing the more and more excessive toddler loss of life charges within the U.S.
On contraception, the plan would reverse the Inexpensive Care Act’s requirement that medical health insurance cowl contraception with out copays, and would revive the Trump administration’s broad “non secular and ethical” exemptions to the contraceptive mandate—which allowed employers to disclaim medical health insurance protection for any type of contraception. Undertaking 2025 would additionally remove insurance coverage protection for the morning-after tablet Ella (which, not like Plan B, requires a prescription).
On intercourse schooling, the plan would permit solely abstinence-based classes, which train individuals to “chorus from nonmarital sexual exercise”—a notoriously ineffective method. It will remove the requirement that intercourse teaching programs be proof primarily based.
In regard to transgender healthcare, Undertaking 2025 directs the subsequent president to ban gender-affirming healthcare and reverse what the authors name the “poisonous normalization of transgenderism” in society. It directs the CDC to cease gathering knowledge on gender id and blocks the Nationwide Institutes of Well being from funding analysis on gender id and transgender healthcare, permitting solely research of the “short-term and long-term destructive results of cross-sex interventions.” It additionally directs the Division of Protection to “reverse insurance policies that permit transgender people to serve within the navy.”
Half two of the “Misogynist Manifesto” sequence will break down Undertaking 2025’s plans to intestine ladies’s rights within the office and the classroom. Half three will deal with the right-wing imaginative and prescient to “rip and shred” the federal authorities and U.S. democracy as we all know it.
This text seems within the Fall 2024 problem of Ms., which hits newsstands Sept. 24. Be a part of the Ms. group immediately and also you’ll get points delivered straight to your mailbox.
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