Trump allies get defensive when questioned on 'Project 2025' birth control plans

Conservatives are looking to limit access to contraception if Donald Trump wins a second term as president and allow more employers to opt out of birth control coverage.

The former president says he won't ban contraception, but the "Project 2025" blueprint being drawn up by his allies would remove requirements to cover male condoms and require insurers to cover “fertility awareness-based methods” of family planning, such as apps that track menstrual cycles, and urge a federal study of the long-term effects of birth control, reported Politico.

“I’ve been very concerned with just the emphasis on expanding more and more contraception,” said Emma Waters, a senior research associate at The Heritage Foundation, which leading the project. “We want to make sure [women are] getting the thing that’s best for them."

Trump recently said he was "looking at" restrictions on contraception in the wake of the Dobbs decision taking away abortion rights, but the former Trump administration official who drafted the "Project 2025" health care proposals insisted the restrictions outlined in the blueprint would not pull contraceptives from the market or criminalize their use.

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“The notion that there’s a formal organized movement to ban contraception across America is downright silly," said Roger Severino, that former Trump administration official. "I don’t know how that idea came about. But it strikes me as political posturing in the wake of the Dobbs decision to try to mislead people into thinking everything is up for grabs having to do with sex. It’s fearmongering.”

Trump campaign officials Chris Lacivita and Susie Wiles issued a statement distancing themselves from Project 2025, which is staffed by numerous former administration officials and calls for a complete overhaul of birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act, including an allowance for insurers to drop coverage of Plan B pills and other emergency contraception.

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“Instead of a mandate of a particular potentially abortifacient drug, it should be opt-in instead of opt-out,” Severino said. “Mandates are a difficult thing to impose on the American people, especially when you have something as fraught as issues of potential loss of life.”

The Trump administration previously overhauled the Title X program, which provides birth control, STD screenings and other reproductive services to low-income people, and Project 2025 calls to "quickly" reinstate those restrictions that had been repealed under president Joe Biden.

“Our experience of Trump in the first term was that, while he can say whatever he wants, when his supporters say, ‘This is what we want done,’ it gets lifted up and executed,” said Clare Coleman, president and CEO of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents Title X.

“When candidate Trump says — and, first of all, who can believe anything he says? — but when he says, ‘I’m not going to ban it,’ the question is, what is ‘it’?” Coleman added.