Monday, August 26, 2024

Project 2025 – Reproductive Rights? - Talking Points Lawyers Defending Democracy - LDAD

Project 2025 – Talking Points to Protect our Democratic Institutions – LDAD
Foreword (Page 6)

“[C]onservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

This proposal is designed, in the words of the authors, to “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”  The proposal builds on and celebrates Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s recent decision that, after fifty years, overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision recognizing a woman’s constitutional right to control her own body and to make her own decision about whether to have a family. Project 2025’s proposal for a universal ban on abortion would not only take the family-planning decision away from women and places it in the hands of the state, but would similarly control other reproductive health decisions. A more extraordinary assault on individual freedom is difficult to imagine.   

Comstock Act (Page 459)

“Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.”

Why it Matters: Talking Points

This is a reference to the Comstock Act, a moribund federal law passed in 1873 and named for Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader who advocated for female chastity and against pornography, birth control and abortion.

As part of his assault on fundamental freedoms, Comstock’s law purports to prohibit mailing anything that could be used in an abortion – even ordinary surgical supplies such as gloves and sutures. For more than 100 years, however, the courts and the Justice Department have consistently ruled that the law does not apply to mailing items for a lawful purpose.

Project 2025 would reverse this understanding and prosecute people if they mailed FDA-approved abortion medicines, even to states where abortion is legal. This would effectively institute a national abortion ban, depriving women of their rights under state law. It also raises the specter of a President resurrecting and reinterpreting other laws to destroy freedoms.

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