Project 2025 abortion surveillance idea comes back to bite Trump

As Donald Trump continues toflounder around his response to a sustained assault from Democrats over policy prescriptions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, his rivals are sticking the knife in further.

The DNC is out with a new memo on Thursday detailing how conservatives hope to use a second Trump presidency to expand state-led efforts to monitor women who get abortions — even if they do so in states where the practice is legal.

Those efforts directly conflict with Trump’s stated desire to leave the issue up to state governments. A shift in federal policy could end up being a clear thumb on the scale in favor of conservative states who wish to police the practice of abortion outside their borders.

The ex-president has trodden a winding path on the issue of abortion rights. He routinely insists that he does not support a national ban on abortion and wants the issue left up to the states, even as he simultaneously and repeatedly has claimed credit for the end of federal protections on abortion.

He has also endorsed any conservative state government push to monitor womens’ pregnancies in past interviews. In two separate instances this year, Trump implied that he would not oppose any Republican push to level such surveillance against pregnant women.

Democrats have seen an angle of opportunity here, and are now tying the former president to language in the Project 2025’s section on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS.) The project details how it would direct a conservative HHS chief to get rid of guidance around the agency’s rules regarding patient information disclosures, including a portion which explicitly states that a health care provider would be prohibited from reporting a patient’s intent to