Trump then deflected and, in true 2024 Republican Party fashion, managed to take a question about abortion and pivot to Hunter Biden: “I hate to go on shows like Joe Biden, ‘I’m not going to give my son a pardon. I will not under any circumstances give him a pardon.’ I watched this and I always knew he was going to give him a pardon. And so, I don’t like putting myself in a position like that. So things do change. But I don’t think it’s going to change at all.”
To be clear, Trump’s first answer — that he supposedly won’t restrict the availability of abortion pills — isn’t exactly reassuring for a number of reasons. First, as we’ve seen throughout his career, he lies like he breathes. Second, as part of anti-abortion leaders’ escalating war on medication abortion, they’ve tried to reinstate previous restrictions on abortion pills — for example, requiring in-clinic consultations instead of simply mailing the pills, and through how many weeks of pregnancy the pills can be prescribed to end a pregnancy. It’s easy to see Trump directing his FDA to simply reinstate previous restrictions that were only recently revoked under the Biden administration, and argue that he isn’t technically imposing new restrictions.
Also, Project 2025 lays out how the Department of Justice can effectively ban the mailing of abortion pills in all states by enforcing the Comstock Act of 1873, while the FDA can revoke approval of the medications, which were approved in 2000. Project 2025 was written by numerous former Trump administration staffers and right-wing thought leaders who Trump appointed to write the Republican Party’s 2024 platform over the summer. Vice President-elect JD Vance even wrote the introduction to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ recent book.
In 2018, the Heritage Foundation boasted that then-President Trump had implemented two-thirds of the agenda they wrote for him at the time, all within two years of his presidency. Plan C Pills, an organization that helps connect people to medication abortion by mail — whether they’re pregnant or not — for as low as $50, told Jezebel last month that they saw a surge in visits to their website immediately after Trump won. Within days of Trump’s victory, Roberts smugly declared that he’s “ecstatic” with Trump’s cabinet picks and that they’re “exceeding our expectations.”
“With the Trump administration comes a lot of uncertainty about what [abortion] access will look like. While he flip-flopped a lot with his words, Project 2025 is very clear about wanting to restrict access to abortion pills by mail and more generally,” Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C Pills, said. “So, we fully anticipate that much of what’s in [Project 2025] will be implemented, and we advise people to be prepared.”
