Turns out Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has yet another connection to the group behind Project 2025.Maxppp/ZUMA
Bad news for the Trump campaign: Despite their candidate’s desperation to distance himself from Project 2025, connections keep emerging between Trump, his allies, and the authors of the right-wing playbook for a second Trump term.
The latest one? Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the introduction to a 2017 report published by the Heritage Foundation—the group behind the publication of Project 2025—that promoted banning abortion nationwide and criticized IVF. The news, first reported by the New York Times, comes at a particularly bad time for the Trump campaign. Both Trump and Vance have flip-flopped on their abortion stances in light of the fallout—and political unpopularity—of rising abortion bans. That includes Trump saying that, if reelected, he wants to make the government or insurance companies pay for IVF.
Compared with some of Vance’s other actions and comments—including lambasting childfree “cat ladies,” journalists, and teachers, and supporting the federal criminalization of the mailing of abortion pills (which Vance has since walked back)—his introduction to the Heritage Foundation report reads as rather tame. In it, he acknowledged criticism Trump faced “for painting an overly pessimistic view of his own country.” (See Trump’s dystopian inauguration speech on “American carnage.”) Later in the introduction, Vance wrote that people living in poverty—as Vance did growing up—should not necessarily be blamed for their circumstances:
We should not glance quickly at the poor and suggest that their problems derive entirely from their own bad decisions before moving on to other matters. Rather, we should consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us. It molds our attitudes, our habits, and our decisions. It sets boundaries for how we perceive possibilities in our own lives.
But other essays included in the report introduced by Vance are far more dogmatic. An essay by Jeanne Mancini, president of the anti-abortion March for Life Education and Defense Fund, states that her group’s goal is for “abortion [to] become unthinkable in the United States.” An essay by Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, an organization that criticizes surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies, denounces IVF and delay in general with childbearing: “The truth is that for both mother and child, pregnancy is better earlier rather than later. Assisted reproductive technology and egg freezing are not magic pills to take when you are ready for a baby.” Another essay characterizes the birth of children to unwed parents as a “tragedy.”
Republicans have been on the defensive ever since advocates have raised alarms about the Dobbs decision imperiling IVF access, which has already come to pass in Alabama, whose state Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that embryos should be considered the same as children. But given that Senate Republicans subsequently blocked a vote on a bill to protect IVF access nationwide, they have not inspired much confidence—which Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has been using to its advantage, outlining the dangers Trump could pose to IVF access in a second term.
It’s no surprise that Vance’s team has tried to downplay his role in the Heritage report. Luke Schroeder, a spokesperson for Vance, told the Times: “Senator Vance has long made clear that he supports I.V.F. and does not agree with every opinion in this seven-year-old report, which features a range of unique views from dozens of conservative thinkers.” The spokesperson also told the Times that Vance “did not have any input on the commentary” included in the report. Noah Weinrich, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, told the Times that Vance “had no role in producing or approving the contents of the 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity, outside of writing the introduction.”
Yet that does not change the fact that Vance’s involvement provides yet another piece of evidence that Trump and his team have many ties to the same people behind Project 2025; Vance also wrote the introduction to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, being marketed as a roadmap for conservatives to “take back” the country and various institutions within it.
“As it turns out, Donald Trump’s running mate cosigned Project 2025’s radical agenda to undermine IVF, ban abortion nationwide, and control women’s most personal health care decisions long before it even had a name,” Harris-Walz 2024 Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. Chitika added that the Times report “confirms that Trump, Vance, and their Project 2025 allies’ plans have been in the works for nearly a decade—if they get the chance, they will rip away women’s freedoms in every corner of this country.”
