What Project 2025 actually says about birth control is alarming

After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the necessity of free and accessible contraception has been a near-constant talking point.

But the cost of contraception in the US is higher than you might think. Indeed, contraception accounted for 30-44 per cent of out-of-pocket healthcare costs for women before it was covered by the ACA, according to Planned Parenthood.

If the ACA — otherwise known as Obamacare — was overturned, over 62.4 million women would find themselves without access to no-cost birth control, according to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC); and 48 million women would lose access to free emergency contraception.

At the Trump-Harris debate in Pittsburgh earlier this month, Trump admitted that he had the “concepts of a plan” for healthcare policy to replace the ACA, but nothing concrete.

And earlier in May, Trump said he was “looking at” policy to restrict contraceptive access in some states, before backpedaling on Social Truth.

Project 2025 — the 900-page policy document from former Trump aides and a right-wing think tank — goes even further, suggesting that the emergency contraceptive (morning after) pill is a “potential abortifacient” and should not be considered contraception under the ACA .

Project 2025 also recommends that the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) should eliminate coverage of emergency contraception altogether under its preventive guidelines.

With an explicit anti-abortion agenda throughout the proposals, Project 2025 also suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should “(r)eturn to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.’”

The slide from abortion bans to contraceptive restrictions is far from over. The Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think tank that authored Project 2025 — appears to stand against all recreational sex.

A video posted on their X (Twitter) account asserts that removing the “senseless use of birth control pills” would “(return) the consequentiality to sex.”

As president, Trump reduced access to contraception for lower-income people by cutting funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and bringing in restrictions on the Title X program.

He also successfully weakened women’s ability to receive free contraception under the ACA. In 2020, the Supreme Court approved exemptions which would allow employers to deny coverage for birth control for religious or moral objections.

Despite this, Trump has said on his social media platform Truth Social that he would “never, ever advocate imposing restrictions on birth control.”

Last year, JD Vance said on CNN that he doesn’t know “any Republican, at least not a Republican with a brain, that’s trying to take (birth control) rights away from people.”

However, 195 Republicans voted again for the Right to Contraception Act in 2022, which would have recognized the legal right to voluntary contraception.

“This election, Americans have a clear choice: give Trump and Vance unlimited power over our bodies and futures by tearing away access to Plan B and birth control and raising health care costs, or elect Vice President Harris and Governor Walz to defend our freedoms and fight to make access to affordable reproductive care a reality for all,” DNC National Press Secretary Emilia Rowland said on Friday.