Gina M Randazzo/Zuma
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s guidebook for Republican control of the presidency and Congress, is, unsurprisingly, coming for abortion rights. But in a new twist, they want to use a key disability rights law to do it.
In Project 2025’s plan for the Department of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, a former Trump administration HHS official, writes the following:
The undeniable reality of abortion is that it does not always result in a dead baby, and these born-alive babies are left to die. HHS should use EMTALA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits disability discrimination, to investigate instances of infants born alive and left untreated in covered hospitals.
The premise of Severino’s claims, says Marissa Ditkowsky, the National Partnership for Women & Families‘ disability economic justice counsel, is a fabrication.
“It’s always concerning when people repeat medical myths to score political points,” Ditkowsky says. “It’s even more concerning when disabled people are used as a political football without consulting or truly centering us.”
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is a landmark piece of federal disability rights legislation that protects disabled people from discrimination on the basis of their disability. The activism that led to its passage was something many conservative politicians would scoff at, if not demonize: In 1977, disability activists and their allies in the Black Panther Party participated in sit-ins in federal buildings to push HHS’ then-secretary to sign off on the new regulations.
Using Section 504 “to demonize pregnant people who may seek an abortion goes against the very purpose,” Ditkowsky says, since “disabled pregnant people are more likely to experience complications” that threaten their lives and health.
This use of civil rights law to attack abortion in Project 2025 isn’t surprising to Sabrina Talukder, director of the Center for American Progress’ women’s initiative. Talukder argues that the project’s research scrapes “the bottom of the barrel” of unrelated laws to make an authoritative-sounding case.
“Project 2025 is about trying to use existing government institutions and structures to exert as much control as possible over the reproductive autonomy of Americans,” Talukder said, “really by any means necessary.”
