Inside the MAGA Plan to Attack Birth Control, Surveil Women and Ban the Abortion Pill

Republicans’ Project 2025 blueprint spells out how they’ll leverage virtually every arm, tool and agency of the federal government to attack abortion.

The Supreme Court announced last week that it would take up a case considering restrictions on the most widely-used method of abortion in the United States: the abortion pill. Under a worst-case scenario for American women, that case could have triggered a full reversal of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, cutting off access to the medication across the country. That didn’t happen. The Supreme Court said it would only consider a more narrow set of questions about regulatory changes that have made the abortion pill more accessible in recent years. It could significantly limit access to mifepristone, but won’t end it altogether.

But it may not matter how the high court rules if Republicans win the presidency next November. That’s because GOP operatives have already crafted an expansive blueprint, 887 pages long, laying out in painstaking detail how they intend to govern, including plans to leverage virtually every arm, tool and agency of the federal government to attack abortion access. The document explicitly names their intention not just to rescind FDA approval for the abortion pill if they regain control of the White House in 2024, but to revive a 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending or receiving through the mail any “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” that could be used to facilitate an abortion. That law, the Comstock Act, is viewed as a de facto federal abortion ban by reproductive rights advocates and anti-abortion activists alike.