I’m a feminist – I thought I would declare that straight off. I got my first job after university in the 70s when some companies still expected women to leave work if they got pregnant and stay home to raise children, when I was often the only women in meetings, and when a man making a pass at a female colleague was a source of humour rather than grounds for discipline.
This is another of my occasional posts on how the administration of Donald Trump is ‘writing history’.
What actions has the Trump administration taken against women. And what does Project 2025 – the driving force behind Trump – say about women?
According to The 19th, an independent news organization, Project 2025, authored by members of the conservative Heritage Foundation and others, has a lot to say about “gender, sexuality and race, offering a variety of ways to cut off abortion access and aiming to end nearly all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity, or even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors.” (A Wikipedia article describes the Heritage Foundation origins and developments.)
Let’s be more specific.
Disband the gender policy council – in an executive order on January 20, 2025 titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (how’s that for a title?), the gender policy council was terminated. The Gender Policy Council was established by President Biden to create and implement a national strategy on gender equity and equality. Its work focused on areas like increasing economic security and opportunities for women, addressing discrimination, and fighting for equal rights for all.
End any collection of data related to gender – In 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that restricts the collection of data on gender identity, directing federal agencies to use the term “sex” rather than “gender” and limiting options to male and female. According to the Biden administration White House, the gender policy council was intended to advance gender equity and equality as a matter of human rights, justice, and fairness. It was described as a strategic imperative that “reduces poverty and promotes economic growth, increases access to education, improves health outcomes, advances political stability, and fosters democracy. The full participation of all people — including women and girls — across all aspects of our society is essential to the economic well-being, health, and security of our Nation and of the world.”
Apparently, Donald Trump and his cohorts at Project 2025 don’t care about any of that.
Access to Abortion – Project 2025 is against abortion. Several key players involved with P2025 along with the shadowy ‘money bags’ behind it arranged for a conservative, catholic majority on the supreme court that reversed Roe V Wade. Many of those people are pro-life Catholics some are members of Opus Dei.
The Trump administration has already declared that abortion is not health care a move that is intended to end the use of Medicaid to fund any aspect of abortion. Too bad if you can’t afford to pay outside the system. The administration also intends to eliminate access to abortion pills. Project 2025 also suggests prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, even for non-abortion services, and instead direct it to “health care centers that provide real health care for women.” I wonder what ‘real health care’ is.
Trump has also recinded Biden’s Executive Order 14076 – the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. So women will once again be threatened at health care clinics and places like Planned Parenthood.
According to ACLU, on June 3, 2025, the Trump administration rescinded guidance that reaffirmed hospitals’ obligation under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) to provide health-saving and lifesaving abortion care to patients experiencing medical crises. The rescission of the guidance is yet another clear sign the administration is caving to its anti-abortion allies and reneging on President Trump’s campaign promises that his administration would not interfere with abortion access. (Of course, we are accustomed to Trump’s course reversals, you just have to look at tariffs for one recent example.)
Cut off federal funding for states which allow elective abortion. (Project 2025, Section 3.5: Department of Health and Human Services) This proposal also requires invasive monitoring of women, their reproductive cycles, and their health in these states. Source What Does Project 2025 Say … more information can be found here. ““From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. 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.” (Project 2025, Section 3.5: Department of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, page 482, paragraph 2.)” I wonder how they intend to monitor men and their busy sperm??
Further, Project 2025 recommends mass data collection on abortions using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”
And what are they going to do with that data? Scary thought.
A definition of family – Kevin Roberts, chief architect of Project 2025, and VP JD Vance talk have in the past spoken of the ‘anti-family culture’ of the Democrats. According to Project 2025, family is defined at mother, father and their children. The document also states: “Married men and women are the ideal natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”
Remember the famous ‘cat-lady’ statement JD Vance made? He called them “people without children” who “don’t really have a direct stake in [the country].” Source Slate The Christian right – Project 2025 is fundamental a Christian nationalist agenda – is concerned about low birth rates (given their intent to eliminate as many immigrants as possible, one might infer that their concern is primarily about low birth rates among white families.)
According the the National Women’s Law Center, “Project 2025 seeks to impose a hierarchal, gendered, patriarchal vision of society”. And further, Project 2025 would allow anti-discrimination protections to be blocked by the assertion of personal beliefs, under the guise of religious freedom. For example, it would permit people to harass or otherwise discriminate against women and LGBTQI+ people in the name of religion. Handmaid’s Tale anyone?
On the topic of childcare, according to Motherly, a parenting platform, “Instead of providing universal daycare,’ Project 2025 says on page 486, “funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” Familial being other family members like those useful grandmothers that have nothing to do or perhaps the cat-lady aunts?
Their intent is to prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care. JD Vance suggested that grandparents and extended family should help out more to alleviate childcare costs. In 2021, Vance referred to universal day care as “class warfare against normal people”!! He also claimed that “that professional women ‘choose a path to misery’ by prioritizing their careers over having children. Source The Guardian.com.
What about voting rights? Women vote Democrat in higher percentages than men. What better way to improve Republican chances to get elected than to make it more difficult for women to vote? The recently enacted SAVE act – don’t you love their acronyms – requires all Americans to prove their citizenship with government issued documentation – like a passport or a birth certificate – and to upend the way every American citizen registers to vote.
Which group – men or women – typically changes their surname upon marriage? According to CAP – the Center for American Progress – 84 percent of women who marry change their surname, meaning as many as 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate with their legal name on it and thereby could not use their birth certificate to prove citizenship. The SAVE Act makes no mention of being able to show a marriage certificate or change-of-name documentation.
Federally ban chemical abortion medications. (Project 2025, Section 3.5: Department of Health and Human Services) This recommendation is a de facto federal abortion ban – over half of all abortions performed in the United States25 are chemical abortions that are in very early stages of pregnancy. These drugs are also used to treat some types of natural miscarriages, high blood sugar/hyperglycemia, and ulcers, as well as to induce natural labor.
Reverse the mandate that requires that health care providers provide access to and that insurance companies cover contraceptives. (Project 2025, Section 3.5: Department of Health and Human Services) This would increase unwanted/unintended pregnancies, as well as potentially putting highly effective forms of birth control, such as IUDs, financially out of reach for some women.
Prevent health care professionals from even knowing how to perform abortions as part of their training. (Project 2025, Section 3.5: Department of Health and Human Services.) Answer me this, E.T. Parker the author of What Does Project 2025 Say writes: “When a woman has a medical emergency requiring abortion care and no doctors or health care professionals know how to perform one, what happens? SHE DIES.”
And then there are:
- Cuts to programs like SNAP that disproportionately affect women
- The removal of top ranking female leaders in the military, the firing of people like Carla Hayden, the first Black American and first woman to serve as librarian of Congress. (And likely elsewhere since, you know, you’ve got to keep women in their place!)
- Threats to eliminate the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor
- According to the Washington Post, “Women (alongside racial minorities) have been disproportionately fired in purges of National Institutes of Health science review boards and senior military leadership positions. A landmark study on women’s health — the Women’s Health Initiative — was canceled entirely in April, though eventually restored after significant public outcry. The Labor Department likewise canceled grants for women’s apprenticeship programs.”
For further reading, see 35 Ways the Trump Administration has Harmed Women and Families.
What have other autocratic regimes done?
It’s worth noting that Viktor Orban’s administration in Hungary – another right-wing Christian nationalist state – has significantly reduced abortion access. As for Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian leader Erdogan, open democracy.net states that he has “attacked gender equality (saying it is ‘against nature‘), rolled back women’s rights, and cracked down on women’s rights groups.
Turkey is another nation heading towards autocracy. In 2021, in a decision that sparked outrage and condemnation, Erdogan withdrew the country from the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe’s landmark treaty on preventing violence against women and domestic violence. Turkey was the first country to sign the convention, which is named after its commercial capital, and it is now the first – and only – country to have pulled out of it. In her book, Fascism: A Warning, Madeleine Albright writes: “Erdogan has also condemned birth control, urged mothers to bear three or more children, and suggested that women who work are ‘half-people’.”
If we go back further in time, we can look at Hitler’s approach. Madeleine Albright again: “Almost as soon as he took office, Hitler removed women from the bureaucracy, promising them ’emancipation from emancipation’. Women were counseled to tend the hearth, mend, sew, make Apfelkuchen, and give birth to the next generation of Aryan supermen.”
Is this where the US is heading? Are women to lose hard-fought rights and advances in American civil society? If so, will that outcome spill over into other countries?
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M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
