House Democrats highlight abortion horror stories at Project 2025 hearing

Democrats on Capitol Hill took aim at Project 2025 on Tuesday at a special hearing aimed at exposing Americans to the increasingly unpopular conservative policy plan drawn up by a host of right-leaning organizations.

It was a hearing billed as outlining the plan’s “devastating impact on hardworking American taxpayers” and dealing with a wide range of the plan’s proposals — which are extensive in scope and deal with everything from energy policy to education.

But the vast majority of the hearing’s time centered around one issue: abortion access, and the dangerous circumstances which abortion bans across conservatives states around the country can leave women facing.

It’s hard to fault Democrats for fixating on that part of the plan, given the shocking stories that have emerged from woment stuck waiting for their conditions to worsen before doctors would treat them, afraid of running afoul of legislation banning abortion care except in life-threatening circumstances. But the party could run the risk of overshadowing efforts to highlight other aspects of the plan, like how it represents a path to undoing decades of regulation and policies dealing with the environment and could bring to a halt the US’s efforts to fight climate change. There’s also the blueprint for eroding the independence of the Justice Department, which has alarmed constitutional law and ethics watchdogs.

Still, the party’s strategy is inarguably working: An NBC News poll released on Sunday indicates that the “Project 2025” brand is in the absolute furthest depths of unpopularity. More than half of those surveyed — registered voters from a nationwide sample of 1,000 — have a negative view of the policy project, while just 4 percent viewed it positively.

“Just six pages into the more than 900 pages of Trump Project 2025 it says, quote, ‘The Dobbs decision is just the beginning,’” Rep Ayanna Pressley warned at the hearing, which was only attended by Democratic members on the party’s Policy & Steering Committee, party leaders and the “Stop Project 2025 Task Force”.

On Tuesday, several women who had been denied care until the last possible moment shared those same painful stories the Democrats have been highlighting for weeks. One was Gracie Ladd, who described having to leave her home state of Wisconsin to seek abortion care in Chicago because only one hospital in her entire home state would even consider the procedure necessary to keep her from delivering a baby who would have died in minutes if he was even born alive at all. Ladd said she was told by multiple doctors that her son Connor would have been born in agonizing pain.

“I’m angry because in my state, there's no way that I wouldn't be labeled a murderer for making the compassionate choice for my son,” Ladd told the Democratic members. “I'm angry that I had to drive to Chicago to receive abortion care two days in a row with a medical team I had never met, a medical team I did not feel comfortable with ... angry that although I was privileged enough to be able to take time off of work find childcare for my living son and I could travel to Chicago two days in a row, not all women can. What are their options? What do they do in this situation?

“But mostly I'm angry that the people who were not even in that ultrasound room with me on the day that I received the worst news of my life want to try to tell me what I can and cannot do when it comes to the medical choice for my body and my son.”

Her harrowing tale is one of many that Democrats have centered in recent weeks, which have forced the Trump campaign into a clear defensive position. Donald Trump himself remains content to continue espousing his role in the overturning of Roe vs Wade, but has been forced to repeatedly fight back against efforts from his own party to expand the fight against abortion rights and stake out positions in favor of exceptions to state-level bans upon which he would previously have avoided commenting entirely.

Trump has also sought to repair his image with women by embracing a plan to fund in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments through either government subsidies or through a private insurance mandate — both prospects that have been unappealing to conservatives in his party.

But in general the ex-president has done little to repair the gender gap that is forming between him and Kamala Harris, and much of his response to criticism of conservative policies outlined in Project 2025 has been to deny his involvement or connections to the plan entirely.

NBC’s poll — if accurate — shows Harris up more than 20 points among women nationally. A victory on those margins would be proof of a massive divide growing in American society among the gender lines, though one more pronounced among older and whiter communities.