“Where in the world is America going?”
The historian of conservative politics Lee Edwards pondered the future of America after disentangling from its launch of disastrous wars on foreign lands intended to bring more security and freedom. In an interview, the then President George W. Bush had inklings it would turn inward to become more isolationist, protectionist, and nativist. And here we are, glimpsing how new occupants of the Oval Office might pore over Project 2025 on the Resolute Desk.
The hefty document published last year by The Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. is now getting belated attention as we approach a presidential election on November 5th. It proposes policy changes of breathtaking scope and depth in every U.S. government department about the environment we ignore at our peril. The justification for a root and branch overhaul is the extreme belief that America is broken and “freedom and liberty (are) under siege as never before.” It makes no bones about its partisanship, giving unqualified credit to the policies of the former Trump Administration and none to the achievements of Obama or Biden.
I wonder if Edwards as a former Foundation member believes the document promises to safeguard “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the dear aspirations of Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers who believed liberty is a natural right and a moral end. But whose liberty and what rights are we thinking about? Will the liberty to body autonomy and self-determination be protected as fiercely as profit for commerce and investment? Or a right to universal health care valued above the taxes of billionaires and corporations?
To be fair to Project 2025 after a close reading, some of its proposals can be beneficial or at least weathered, but not my theme after searching keywords in its 920 pages. I didn’t get beyond the foreword before stumbling over reproductive rights (read freedoms), gender issues, and women’s healthcare. They are labeled “woke” for the next conservative administration, possibly Trump-Vance, to purge them from new federal documents and legislation.
The hallowed American Constitution doesn’t include the word reproduction among the “Blessings of Liberty”, not surprising for the Founders’ era. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the Second defends gun rights, and the final one (27th) concerns salaries of Members of Congress. Considering the importance we attach to reproduction, the seed corn of population, we need a 28th Amendment to protect that freedom as an inalienable right of nature. The right is recognized by the U.N. and the W.H.O. if weakly observed and mostly ignored, and a timid hope in a divided country where extremists are running well-funded campaigns supported by some church leaders.
When embryos and fetuses far too small to be viable are called “unborn children,” the rhetoric reaches a fever pitch that may encourage violence by hotheads. It is a notion I try to scotch on another post as mistaken identity. Some people don’t share those moral qualms but have nevertheless allied themselves with fundamentalism for political advantage. At least Pope Francis is a consistent Pro-lifer by challenging the morality of abortion and capital punishment.
I suspect pronatalism is another reason for wanting to influence reproductive choices, although we have not seen lately any raw promotion of big families like authoritarian regimes in the past. Making babies is a kind of soft power. What we regard as a private matter has social consequences. Widespread anxieties converge over a declining birth rate, immigration crisis, and the Great Replacement conspiracy theory of white nationalists. For a nation to flourish we need more babies, the story goes. There will be more babies if abortion, fertility control, and sex education are blocked, but if they are unwanted, who will take care of them? There are 400,000 children in foster care today, another 100,000 waiting to be adopted, and 20,000 who stand no chance before adulthood. The smaller government wanted by Project 2025 won’t help them. And although universal daycare in Sweden and elsewhere helps low-income parents with children, we are told it is unaffordable in this richest country in the world!
One of the chief premises of Project 2025 is that families as foundations of national life are threatened by cultural change and moral degeneration. Change is challenging, but the prescriptions it offers are hollow and antique. American social history is viewed through a filter colored by interpretations of Scripture, as if current problems can be solved by turning the clock back to the good old days when Pop was the head-of-household and a breadwinner married to a stay-at-home Mom who cared for 2, 4, or more of their naturally conceived kids. They trooped off to church together every Sunday.
Untold numbers in my generation across the Western world and beyond grew up in that kind of traditional or nuclear family, a model of the ideal home in Project 2025. I did and so did almost all our friends in communities that looked much more homogenous than today. I admit to feeling a little nostalgic looking back on a happy childhood. But the transition in my lifetime to a pluralism with rich cultural diversity is wonderful and has made me more modest about who I am, how much I know, and what I believe. There are many kinds of valid and functional families.
Likewise, as reproductive health care has advanced with technology to offer choices beyond what we imagined possible, it is surely better to leave intimate decisions to patients and their doctors, not government decree. I find common ground with the non-interfering attitude of a retired Presbyterian minister who wrote to defend the separation of church and state in yesterday’s Daily Press: “Displaying the (Ten) commandments and teaching the Bible in public schools fly in the face of what Jefferson and others tried to do when they laid the foundations for this great nation.”
The language of Project 2025 occasionally slips into a pious tone that seems alien to modern America. For instance, the criticism of church closures on Sundays when it seemed prudent early in the Covid pandemic: “What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” I have a church connection but never go for that reason; I go to the woods to save my soul!
The American College of OBGYN (ACOG) assures the public of the safety of abortion practices for healthcare. On the other hand, the language of Project 2025 is a lightning rod for bringing the bolt to ground at all costs, calling abortion a massacre of unborn children that does harm to women and isn’t healthcare. It finds confederates in 14 states that have enacted highly restrictive laws in the wake of the repeal of federal protection under Roe v. Wade. This is not the first time in American history that rights to body autonomy have been dismissed. Less than a century ago, eugenic sterilization laws prevented thousands of women and men from becoming biological parents.
The Project seeks to build hurdles against contraception too by canceling taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood which provides services across the reproductive age range. It calls for a ban on mail-order purchases of pills for abortion and contraception, including emergency contraception. To narrow the options for controlling fertility without providing more sex education is a recipe for more teenage pregnancies. The responsibility for teaching is left to parents, but if most are like mine, they are shy about a matter that puts images in their child’s mind of their genesis in the bedroom! My father avoided the subject, so my mother discreetly gave me a little book intended to correct what I heard whispered in the school playground.
The Project doesn’t go as far as the Quiverfull movement in taking the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply literally, shunning all contraception, including natural methods. It supports fertility awareness by monitoring the menstrual calendar, basal body temperature, and cervical mucus, which it claims to have “unsurpassed effectiveness.” According to the ACOG, pregnancy rates with these methods range from 1 to 5 per 100 per year in the first year of perfect use but only 12-24 on average (better to use two or more simultaneously). They are undeniably safe, though far less effective than pills or implants, and trouble to use carefully.
Considering the criticisms of experts, it is not surprising that the Project regards the basis of transgender treatments as “junk science” or that it opposes laws against sex discrimination. The basis of this authority is presumably the Book of Genesis in which only two sexes are created, whereas the book of nature reveals the distinction is not strictly binary.
I feel pain from reading savage attacks on the leadership of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. I fear if a future government interferes with American science, arguably the nation’s greatest gift to humanity. Funding of reproductive science and women’s health is in jeopardy like embryo stem cell research before, and tissues from aborted fetuses which are considered morally tainted. Isn’t it better to do something with discarded cells than nothing if the provider and the laboratory are strictly separated to avoid a conflict of interest? Another lamentable concern is delegitimizing tissues used for life-saving therapies for childhood illnesses and rabies. Some vaccines are generated from fetal cell lines, derived from only two specimens in the 1960s, and in almost every respect superior to animal cells.
Popular IVF technologies are not named in the text, despite almost everyone knowing someone who owes family building to them or even their own existence. And yet, there is hostility barely covered by a shroud of silence. The moment of union of egg and sperm is sacrosanct for the Project’s authors because “from the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity … rooted in a deep respect for human life from day one until natural death …” Gamete and embryo donation are likewise discouraged without naming them: “never place the desires over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them”. Mitochondrial transfer (called three-parent embryo creation) is banned alongside reproductive cloning, as if they deserve equal repudiation.
When we pass the stage when reproduction no longer matters personally, we should still care about the matter for society’s sake. I wonder how Millennials and Gen Z regard their options, already braided with political and economic cords that could be tied in a Gordian knot next year. They lost out in the Great Recession, then the Covid pandemic, soaring college fees, and tight budgets. There can be little reproductive freedom without an affordable home and the means to support family formation. No wonder they settle down later with a partner or not at all. No wonder they choose only one child or two, or none at all. To have children was considered life’s greatest reward, so it is sad to see it surrendered to the stresses of modern life. They focus their anger on policymakers and corporations dragging their feet on alarming global issues: climate change, pollution, and the Sixth Extinction. I wonder if I would bring children into the world in this Age of Anxiety.
This week I came across graphs depicting happiness and, inversely, poor mental health from population data collected by the economist David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College. Similar studies before 2010 reported a U-shaped curve with age for happiness (read well-being), confirming the clichéd mid-life crisis. Ill-health was shaped like a one-hump camel’s back. The shape of happiness today is a linear slope from young people at the bottom with record rates of self-harm and suicide to my generation at the top. These graphs give one answer to Lee Edwards’s question in 2006. In pointing a finger at the American family, Project 2025 fails to offer a prescription for the key to national well-being - investment in young people. They need the consolation of security and an assurance they will not lose freedoms we took for granted.
Illustration: Project 2025 under a guillotine (source: the author by generative AI)
If the goal is to save souls that are created at fertilization and the embryonic wastage in medically unassisted cycles is about 75%, then the most critical need would be to improve the implantation rate in natural and assisted cycles. These extremists should be funding my research on maternal factors involved in human embryo implantation!
As you rightly point out, the goal should not be the survival of every embryo, but the flourishing of all people in our society. If the focus is truly on human well-being, then both sides of the political spectrum should be able to compromise to get things done!
As you outline, project 2025 includes examples of cruel and unhealthy extremism that limit personal freedoms, promote a fundamentalist Christian theocracy (ignoring the right to religious freedom for non-Christians), and which will increase misery, especially the female half of our citizenry. As a voter, I cannot get past these issues.