By Barry Sheppard [Photo above, Kathy Spillar, Executive Editor, Ms Magazine]
The far right group wrote Project 2025, which has served as a blueprint for Trump’s second term. At the end of last year it issued Project 2026 centered on attacking women’s rights.
It hasn’t received the publicity it deserves.
However, an article by Kathy Spillar in the feminist Ms Magazine outlined it’s proposals.
Spillar says Project 2026 ”picks up where Project 2025 left off: banning abortion pills, weaponizing the 150 year old Comstock Act to criminalize [such] medication by mail, embedding fetal personhood across federal agencies, and stripping every federal safeguard protecting reproductive freedom. As the Women’s March analysis notes bluntly, this blueprint is ‘designed to rebuild a country where women, queer people, trans people and anyone outside their ‘ideal family’ have fewer rights.”
Spillar continues:
“Heritage puts this in softer language — saying that ‘every child that is conceived is to be born to a married mother and father’ and ‘pledging to reduce the supply and demand for abortion at all stages’.
“But we know exactly what this means. A country where a woman’s future is no longer her own.”
“Fetal personhood” means that abortion is murder, and women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them will be so charged.”
Project 2026 builds on the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn its 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade that established that woman had a constitutional right to abortion. Roe v. Wade, as it became known, was enacted under the pressure of the women’s liberation movement in the radicalization of the “Sixties”. The right to abortion was one of the demands of that movement, and new mass actions demanding that right were in the offing.
In his first term, Trump had an opening to appoint three new judges to the Court, and he said that he made his choices on the basis of their opposition to abortion. This cleared the way for the 2022 ruling taking away that constitutional right.
This ruling said that its was up to the states to decide if they allowed abortion. The result is a patchwork of Republican states that banned abortion and those states that upheld the right to abortion.
One of the ways women who sought abortions in the Republican states, was to obtain abortion pills through the mail from states where abortion was allowed. That’s why Project 2026 seeks to ban those pills and outlaw obtaining them through the mail in the meantime.
Project 2026 proposed a federal law to require proof of citizenship in order to vote. Trump has taken up that proposal, requiring birth certificates or passports are the only accepted proofs of citizenship that is designed to ensure that “the right people vote and the right people are elected” according to administration spokespeople.
Just one of the results will be that married women who take on their husband’s name means that their birth certificates will list a different name, making it much more complicated and harder to prove they are citizens under Trump’s rules.
One of Trump’s Supreme Court majority judges has already proposed finding a way to eliminate contraception.
Spillar also says the “plan also endorses dismantling the U.S. Department of Education [also proposed by Trump] entirely. Heritage has pledged to ‘reclaim higher education from the radical Left,’ a phrase that has become a catch-all for eliminating protections for survivors of sexual assault, Title IX [prohibiting discrimination based on sex in education and activities that receive federal funding], LGBTQ + inclusion and academic freedom itself.
“Who benefits when civil rights oversight disappears? Not girls. Not young women on campus. Not any student whose gender, sexuality, or disability puts them at risk of discrimination.
“This is not ‘parental rights.’ It is state-engineered ignorance….
“These are not isolated proposals. They are a coherent strategy to weaken the political power of the very groups most likely to oppose an authoritarian agenda — women, young voters, immigrants and voters of color.
“When women vote, democracy strengthens. When authoritarian movements arise, suppressing women’s votes is always among the first steps.
“Project 2026 also doubles down on shrinking federal agencies that regulate health, safety and labor protections. Newsweek reports that Heritage wants to reduce government spending and regulation in ways that will ‘especially’ hit working families struggling to make ends meet.
“Cut Medicaid, and women suffer. Cut childcare, and women leave the work force. Cut workplace enforcement, and women face more harassment, discrimination and injury.
“Project 2026 places ‘restoring the nuclear family’ at the center at the center of its agenda — explicitly defining that family is a married man and women parenting children….
“A society that tries to legislate gender and dictate family structure is not a free society.”
What a nuclear family has always meant is a patriarchal family, where the father rules over the mother and the children. It is a latest form of patriarchy. The male dominated family first arose with the development of class society, as Frederick Engels explained. He said it was the “historical defeat” of women.
Kathy Spillar concludes with what is to be done.
She says, Project 2026’s “message is clear. They are coming for reproductive freedom. They are coming for voting rights.They are coming for LGBTQ+ equality. They are coming for the federal protections that women rely on every day.
“The United States has faced coordinated backlash against women’s rights before — and every time, women have organized, resisted and reshaped the nation.
“The women who fought for suffrage did not stop when they were dismissed as unreasonable. The women who pushed Title IX into law did not stop when they were told girls didn’t need equal opportunities. The women who built the modern reproductive rights movement did not stop when the courts narrowed their freedoms.
“And we will not stop now.
“Project 2026 is not destiny. It is a warning — and one we must answer with the full force of a movement that has never accepted a future written for us by someone else.
“The coming year will test our resolve. But we have marched before. We have organized before…. And we will do it again. Because women’s rights are not ‘radical ideology.’ They are the foundation of a free and democratic society.
“And we intend to keep it that way.”
