“For those of you who have not heard about Project 2025 yet, it’is called the Mandate for Leadership, you can find it on the internet. In its 900 pages “abortion” is mentioned 199 times and that shows you the implication this document, a policy document, has for sexual and gender likes, in general, but not only”. Says former researcher and activist Susi Meret, now Associate Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark
“Trump is likely to reinstate domestic and international anti-abortion policies that he imposed in his first term, and that President Joe Biden revoked. He also could adopt proposals on abortion and other reproductive health care contained in the 900-page blueprint for the next conservative administration, Project 2025.
The court’s decision to overturn abortion rights “is just the beginning,” states the document, which was drafted by the Heritage Foundation with the help of many Trump administration alumni. The next conservative administration, it says, “should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.”
Susi Meret confirms : “These pages have been drafted by the Heritage Foundation, channeling many organizations, perhaps the most known is American First Legal an anti-immigrant organisation that is led by one of the earlier Trump’s acolytes working at the Trump administration in 2017 and 2020, Stephen Miller. The other one is the Center of Immigration Studies also an anti-immigration organisation and C-Fam [Center for Family and Human Rights] an ultra-Christian organisation that proposes family values, against reproduction and abortions”
Meret and Enda both agree in saying that Project 2025 has also great implications internationally. “Trump is almost certain to invoke — and possibly to expand — abortion-related restrictions on recipients of U.S. foreign assistance. In his previous term, Trump adopted the Reagan-era Mexico City Policy, which prohibits foreign organizations that receive U.S. aid from performing, advocating for or providing counseling or referrals on abortion, even with non-U.S. money. But unlike previous Republican presidents, he expanded the policy considerably. Under Trump, it applied not only to family-planning aid but to all health-care assistance”.
On top of that, Jodie Enda of Fuller Project reminds us: “The Trump administration launched the nonbinding document, called the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family, shortly before the 2020 election that he lost. Biden withdrew from it a few months later. While the one-page agreement has no teeth, abortion-rights advocates worry that with the power of the U.S. behind it, it could create new international norms that do not include abortion in women’s health care. Imposing abortion restrictions on women in countries that rely on U.S. financial assistance has served conservatives well for decades”.
To end on a different note, Bolivian feminist Maria Galindo, provocative author of “Feminismo Bastardo”, has recently urged feminists to walk a different path from the past and proposed a new convergence: “We need a point of convergence that serves as a mirror and represents what I call the meaning of an era for us and for all our struggles[…] that does not minimize or relativize any struggle, which does not perceive any theme as hegemonic and which does not imply the signaling of a single avant-garde.
Neither equality between men and women, nor the so-called women’s rights, function as such because both have been swallowed by the system, […]Not even specific struggles such as abortion or against feminicides have played that role because they are circular struggles, in a game of the macabre, they begin where they end and, despite being fundamental, they reduce our political sense and become negotiation tools for use by the State and political parties. We end up right where we didn’t want to be, we end up being negotiated with conservative forces, by states that blackmail us over and over again.
Let me tell you that depatriarchalization is that word, it is that place, it is that key, it is that concept that can encompass, create cohesion, open up to a new sense of era, identify itself as a general utopia within which to embroider contents as well as a collective sense in which to inscribe practices and knowledge” .
Galindo says that abortion and reproductive rights are fundamental but worns us, in the hands of politicians and governments, they’ve become negotiating tools in an endless tug-of-war.
