House Democrats blamed abortion bans and Donald “Trump’s Project 2025” for pregnancy-related tragedies in an unofficial, Democrat-only “hearing” Tuesday, even though every state law limiting abortion includes an exception to protect the life of the mother.
“Every single woman who has died from Trump abortion bans should be alive today,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., a member of the far-left “Squad.” “What do we have instead? No compassion, no care, and no justice.”
Led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee—which isn’t an official House committee—held a “hearing” Tuesday about Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation-led project that includes a book of conservative policy recommendations and a personnel database for use by the next conservative presidential administration.
“The Dems are focusing on Project 2025 because they need a made-up bogeyman to cover up their lack of an agenda and because they hate anyone proposing real reforms that would actually drain the swamp,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal.
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., agreed that Democrats are wasting time on Project 2025, which he said is a “menu of policy options available to any administration to come,” not “some evil hidden agenda.”
“It is absolutely beyond me that the Democrats are wasting time having a sham ‘hearing’ regarding Project 2025,” Norman told The Daily Signal. “Clearly, Democrats have never heard of presidential transition projects before … something that has been a part of our process for years.”
“Democrats ought to spend less time on their sham ‘hearing’ and more time actually reading Heritage’s ‘Mandate for Leadership,'” Norman continued. “Mandate for Leadership” is the name of the book of conservative policy recommendations, and Heritage has been producing “Mandate” since Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980.
House Democrats claimed that Project 2025 would take “Trump abortion bans nationwide,” though neither the former president nor Project 2025’s materials call for a nationwide ban on abortion or on contraception.
Launched by The Heritage Foundation more than two years ago, Project 2025 has grown to a coalition of more than 110 conservative organizations that developed a transition plan for the next presidential administration. Its work is nonpartisan and available to whomever occupies the White House next year.
Trump repeatedly has distanced himself from Project 2025, but this didn’t stop House Democrats from associating Trump with the plan countless times on Tuesday.
Project 2025 “would jail your ER doctor for saving the life of a pregnant woman,” Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., said, falsely. “It would use every tool at its disposal to enforce state-mandated pregnancy.”
Jeffries, the chairman of the unofficial committee, falsely said Project 2025 “would also mandate government surveillance of pregnancies and miscarriages.”
Project 2025 has two mentions of miscarriage care: one calling for the Department of Health and Human Services to keep statistics on the number of miscarriages, and the other clarifying that a miscarriage is not an abortion.
“Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion,” the 2025 edition of “Mandate for Leadership” says.
Clark told an inaccurate version of the story of a South Carolina woman, Amari Marsh, who “was arrested and charged for the crime of having a miscarriage.”
But South Carolina Solicitor David Pascoe, the Democrat who handled Marsh’s prosecution, said abortion wasn’t a relevant issue in the case. “It had nothing to do with that,” Pascoe told KFF Health News.
Marsh’s arrest warrant alleged that not removing from the toilet the infant that she had just miscarried at the urging of the emergency dispatcher on the phone with her was ultimately “a proximate cause of her daughter’s death.”
Clark also referenced Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, two Georgia women who died from infections caused by complications after taking the abortion pill.
“In Georgia, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller needlessly lost their lives because their doctors feared going to prison if they administered the care their patients needed,” she said.
But Thurman and Miller did not die because of abortion bans.
Abortion in Georgia is banned after around six weeks of pregnancy with an exception if the life of the mother is at risk. Every state abortion ban in the United States includes a life-of-the-mother exception.
Thurman died because the hospital failed to treat her infection, and Miller died because she did not go to the hospital after getting an infection because of misguided fears that state law wouldn’t allow her to be treated, even though it does.
Pressley called abortion “routine medical care.”
“Abortion care is routine medical care, but then Donald J. Trump became president, campaigned on banning abortion care, and even called to punish women for having abortions,” she said.
No state laws make it a crime for a woman to get an abortion.
Pressley blamed Trump for appointing “three extreme right-wing justices in the Supreme Court.”
“In June 2022, just as Donald J. Trump promised they would, those three justices banded together with other Republican-appointed justices and overturned Roe [v. Wade],” Pressley said. “They gave a green light for Republicans to criminalize abortion; to criminalize doctors and nurses in states across the country today.”
In truth, Project 2025 calls for the government to comply with laws that prevent federal funding of abortions. It also calls for federal support for alternatives to abortion, like adoption.
Rep. Barbara Lee of California, chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus, added to the false narrative that Project 2025 would criminalize abortion nationwide.
Republicans “are actually now talking about also how they want to punish people who get abortions,” Lee said.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts responded to the “unserious and illegitimate spectacle masquerading as an official proceeding.”
“The members of this orchestrated campaign to distort and mislead the American people about the policy recommendations in Heritage’s long-standing manual, ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ represent a liberal movement that would rather lie than engage in honest policy debate,” he said in a statement.
Rob Bluey contributed to this report.