The Next Battle for Equality

The reelection of Donald Trump threatens the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of hard-fought gains for American women and girls in reproductive rights, the workplace, and education. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the second Trump administration calls for ending abortion and curtailing contraception access, cutting programs to support single mothers and their children, eliminating Head Start child care programs for low-income families, rolling back women’s workplace rights and pay equity measures, gutting Title IX protections against sexual assault and harassment in education, and much more. The Heritage Foundation, a wealthy right-wing think tank, has tremendous influence over Trump, who is staffing his new administration with many of the authors of Project 2025.

Regarding reproductive rights, Project 2025 calls on the president to direct the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reverse approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which is now used in two-thirds of all abortions, and to ban telehealth abortion, which is now used in one-fifth of all abortions. The plan also directs the Department of Justice to misuse an 1873 anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act—after the 19th-century anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock—to criminally prosecute anyone who mails abortion pills and potentially any medical instrument used in procedural abortion, effectively establishing a nationwide ban on abortion.

Project 2025 also urges Trump to reverse the Biden administration’s enforcement of federal laws protecting access to emergency medical care and privacy for pregnant patients. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to offer abortions in medical emergencies regardless of state bans, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act protects the privacy of abortion patients. And although the Biden administration issued executive orders and filed lawsuits to enforce these laws against states banning abortion, Project 2025 calls on the new Trump administration to withdraw Biden’s executive orders, dismiss these lawsuits, and issue executive orders to the contrary.

On the subject of contraception, Project 2025 would reverse the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance cover contraception without copays. It would also revive the Trump administration’s broad religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate so that employers, pharmacists, insurers, and others don’t have to cover or dispense contraception. Project 2025 also seeks to erode contraception access for teenagers, attack state programs for affordable birth control, cut insurance coverage for emergency contraception and IUDs, and block reproductive health clinics from receiving federal Title X family planning funds, instead giving this money to religious anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers that mislead women and discourage the use of FDA-approved contraceptives.

Despite not supporting reproductive health care and family planning, Project 2025 proposes cutting programs to aid single mothers and low-income families and redirects public funds toward promoting “biblically based” heterosexual marriage. The plan notably does not support paid parental leave laws or raising the minimum wage.

Concerning education, Project 2025 encourages the elimination of the Department of Education, which enforces Title IX—the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. It would allow Title IX enforcement only through litigation filed by the Department of Justice—a costly, time-consuming, and inefficient way to enforce the law.

Project 2025 would rescind the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations, which strengthen protections against sexual harassment and assault in schools. Instead, it would reinstitute the first Trump administration’s regulations, which provided extraordinary “due process” rights to men accused of sexual harassment and assault in school disciplinary hearings while also requiring victims to submit to cross-examination by the accused.

Project 2025 recommends narrowing the meaning of “sex” in Title IX to “biological sex assigned at birth,” which would allow the use of gender stereotypes in education and would remove protections for LGBTQ+ students. The plan would increase public funding for religious education through the expansion of school choice policies and give federal education dollars to states as block grants without requiring that they comply with federal antidiscrimination law.

As for student debt, Project 2025 would end Biden’s loan forgiveness program and instead put forward student loan repayment programs that would multiply costs for borrowers, increase defaults, and end existing programs that allow borrowers to earn cancellation. Women hold 64% of all student loan debt. Trump himself has threatened to increase taxes on university endowments and to fine universities with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

In the workplace, Project 2025 eviscerates women’s long-held rights to sex equality in employment. The plan urges the president to rescind executive orders signed by Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s that prohibit federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race and sex, and it would weaken Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment.

Like Title IX on education, Project 2025 calls for narrowing the meaning of the word “sex” in Title VII to mean only biological sex, allowing employment decisions based on gender stereotypes as well as discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Project 2025 would eliminate Title VII coverage of “disparate impact” discrimination, in which employer policies are neutral on their face but impact women in discriminatory ways. The plan also directs the president to issue an executive order exempting religious employers from laws prohibiting sex discrimination.

Project 2025 would weaken the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces Title VII. It would end the agency’s longstanding power to issue guidance, technical assistance, and policy positions interpreting Title VII, and it would block the agency from entering into consent decrees with employers to resolve discrimination cases. This means women would have to file expensive and time-consuming lawsuits to defend their Title VII rights. The plan also suggests ending federal pay-equity programs.

Finally, Project 2025 stipulates the end of all programs designed to eliminate discrimination against women and people of color at the federal, state, local, and private-sector levels and directs the Department of Justice’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate and criminally prosecute state and local governments that offer these programs.

Advocates for women’s rights are pledging to fight back. Since last summer, governors and attorneys general in California, New York, Massachusetts, and elsewhere have been preparing legal arguments and building infrastructure to be ready for a second Trump administration.

Just days after the election, California Governor Gavin Newsom called an emergency legislative session to prepare for anticipated Trump administration rollbacks of the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants, as well as the destruction of environmental protections. “We are marshaling the arguments and evidence needed to be ready to challenge in court unconstitutional and unlawful federal policies, and to mount robust and vigorous defenses of California’s laws, policies, and programs on issues critical to Californians,” Newsom said.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has instructed his staff to draft a brief against a potential national abortion ban, and his office is preparing arguments on “almost every issue” that could arise during the second Trump administration.

“If he violates the law, as he has said he would, as Project 2025 says he will, then we are ready,” Bonta said. “No matter what the incoming administration has in store, California will remain the steadfast beacon of progress it has long been. … We’ll continue to be a check on overreach and push back on abuse of power; be the antidote to dangerous, extremist, hateful vitriol; be the blueprint of progress for the nation to look to.” Bonta noted that California has the fifth-largest economy in the world.

In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have pledged to protect against federal threats to reproductive rights, civil rights, immigration, gun safety, the environment, and other issues. Hochul has created a new Empire State Freedom Initiative that is developing comprehensive plans to address any policy and regulatory threats that may emerge from the new Trump administration.

“We will use the rule of law to fight back,” James said in an address the day after the election. “My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backward. During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers. Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”

In Massachusetts, Attorney General Andrea Campbell is also ready to meet the moment. “President-elect Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do as president,” Campbell wrote in a statement released on November 6. “We need to believe him and to be ready for the challenges ahead. Across the country, attorneys general will be on the front lines to protect our fundamental rights and freedoms. We will not shy away or back down from the critical work ahead.”

Nongovernmental civil rights groups are ready to fight back as well. “Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a November 7 statement. “We did it during his first term—filing 434 legal actions against Trump while he was in office—and we’ll do it again.” 

Carrie Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies at Smith and a professor of the study of women and gender. Her latest book is Abortion Pills: US History and Politics (Amherst College Press).