Pregnant? The GOP wants to track you and any decisions you make

Last week three Republican senators gave Americans—and women, in particular—a clear, chilling, and unmistakable taste of how their lives would be altered if Donald Trump is put back into office. 

Republicans do not currently hold the presidency or a majority in the U.S. Senate, but they expect to after the 2024 election. The plans for governance, should Americans place them back in charge, are explicitly set forth in the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page manifesto known as Project 2025, a document that proposes to institutionalize the Christian nationalist ambitions of the anti-abortion lobby at nearly every level of the federal government. These plans are intended to be implemented almost instantaneously upon inauguration of Trump as president.

What that means in real-world terms is that Americans would experience an immediate, radical, and highly unsettling transformation of their relationship to their government. Federal agencies would, almost overnight, become playpens for the hard right, their functions converted and  weaponized to implement social engineering strategies intended to constrain and regulate behaviors that Evangelical Christians disapprove of. One of their primary targets will be the behavior of women and others who become pregnant.

To that end, Republican senators are carefully laying the legislative groundwork that will enable these strategies at the federal agency level. Last week, Alabama’s Republican Senator Katie Britt, together with Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, introduced an Orwellian bill that would establish a federal website, Pregnancy.gov. The website would enable the Department of Health and Human Services to solicit and collect personal identifying information on pregnant women and others, ostensibly for the purpose of providing them with prenatal advice on how to proceed with their pregnancies. The bill parallels an effort by Rubio in January to create a similar website called Life.gov. 

Innocently termed the MOMS Act, the explicit purpose of the legislation is to “support, encourage and assist” women in “carry[ing] their pregnancies to term,” by directing them to so-called pregnancy crisis centers whose purpose is to discourage—and often intimidate—women and others from terminating their pregnancies. The proposed law provides for direct, personal contact to be initiated by a cadre of newly installed, theocratic government employees toward pregnant patients who register their contact information with the site in order to pressure them in their reproductive decisions. It also implements a federalized regimen for child support payments that commences at the moment of pregnancy, laying the groundwork for governmental regulation that treats “fetal personhood” as a recognized status under U.S. law.

This legislation is being touted by Republicans—stung by recent electoral defeats by voters who abhor their forced-birth policies—as an example of their “compassion” toward women and others who become pregnant. What it  reveals, however, is not compassion, but coercion, harassment, and ultimately, control.

RELATED STORY: ‘If Roe can fall, anything can’: Which rights will the GOP come for next?

As observed by Jessica Valenti in her “Abortion, Every Day” substack:

According to the proposed legislation, pregnancy.gov would take users through a series of questions—including their zip code and contact information—that would direct women to “relevant resources” in their area. This assessment would then be sent to a government staffer who may use it “to conduct outreach via phone or email to follow up with users on additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review.”

In other words, after entering their personal information into a government website, women would be directed to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and then contacted by someone from the government about their pregnancy—presumably to pressure them out of an abortion. (Crisis pregnancy centers will frequently harass women who have been to see them, calling nonstop to shame them out of getting care.)

The proposed bill, sponsored by 13 Republican senators, explicitly prohibits dispensation of any information to pregnant patients that could direct them toward organizations—such as Planned Parenthood, for example—that provide advice concerning pregnancy alternatives such as abortion. These organizations, in fact, are styled as “prohibited entities.” Meanwhile, entities involved in so-called abortion pill reversal and healing and support services for abortion survivors are approved as “relevant resources.” It also explicitly contemplates the retention of “personal identifying information” of its registrants, who would be prompted to hand over that information to fully use the site’s resources. 

The legislation would mandate the publication of “Federal funding opportunities” to organizations that qualify as virulent forced-birth proponents, including grants to anti-abortion non-profits to establish the technical infrastructure “for carrying out at-home telehealth visits for screening, monitoring, and management” of pregnant women and others. As Valenti points out, since the Department of Health and Human Services presently does not (practically speaking) have the staffing or wherewithal to contact every pregnant woman in the country, these tasks would most likely be contracted out to forced-birth organizations such as so-called pregnancy crisis centers.

The co-opting of governmental health and social services to enforce the right’s anti-abortion fanaticism is nothing new. Missouri, for example, allocated over $8 million in taxpayer funds last year to its Alternatives to Abortion program even after the state passed a near-total ban on the procedure. That program, designed to coerce unsuspecting pregnant patients toward crisis pregnancy centers has nothing to do with assisting pregnant people’s health. Rather, it has everything with restricting abortion as an option. The fact that these institutionalized measures unconstitutionally exploit public resources to promote Evangelical Christian sensibilities is no longer even an afterthought in such states, nor would it be a consideration in any revamped Trump administration.

Right-wing, forced-birth groups have reacted with wounded outrage at the media backlash to Britt’s proposed legislation, pointing out that participation in the website is voluntary and that the creation of a database of pregnant women is not explicitly included in its language. This is disingenuous. Although the legislation requires privacy policy and procedures be set forth prohibiting the deliberate sharing of personal contact information with any “other entities” without “written consent” (unlike Rubio’s prior incarnation of Britt’s proposed bill, which explicitly encouraged such coordination), there are no provisions regarding how such retained data on pregnant people might otherwise be used. Nor is there any explanation of how third parties could possibly be constrained by any privacy provisions.    

More importantly, this legislation must be read and understood as just one component of a much broader anti-abortion template Republicans plan to implement should Trump be permitted to again occupy the Oval Office. As noted by Carrie N. Baker, writing for Ms. magazine, that template bans the distribution of the abortion pill mifepristone (currently utilized in over 60% of abortions nationwide). It also eliminates shield laws, which protect pro-choice telehealth groups from extending outreach to states in which abortion is banned, proliferating crisis pregnancy centers—fronts for the forced birth lobby—to coerce and misinform women and others about their reproductive options. It also suggests that the Justice Department will engage in harassment and surveillance against manufacturers of abortion pills and those clinics which allow and facilitate the termination of pregnancies nationwide.

But the most alarming aspect of this legislation may be its radical transformation of the nation’s child support laws to establish “fetal personhood,” extending the reach of such laws and criminalizing their violation. As most recently (and vividly) demonstrated by the Alabama Supreme Court, right-wing judges are now utilizing existing criminal statutes in order to broaden the “rights” of fetuses. This is used to justify further restrictions on women and others, sanctioning civil penalties against those whose actions are seen as violating those rights. This is a necessary step toward a broader-based infliction of harsh criminal penalties upon pregnant patients and those who assist them in terminating their pregnancies, the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion movement and its supporters.

The Heritage Foundation authors of Project 2025 have made no secret that their goal is to restrict and prohibit recreational sex, particularly among women. To that end they are quite forthcoming about their intent to prohibit not only abortion but birth control as well. As explained by writer Mary Harrington, speaking at a Heritage forum in April, 2023, "[A] good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and for rewilding sex, returning the danger to sex, returning the intimacy and really, the consequentiality to sex..." 

As posted on The Heritage Foundation’s X account (formerly the platform known as Twitter):

Sen. Katie Britt entered the larger public consciousness in March through her over-the-top, melodramatic response to President Biden’s State of the Union address. She was deservedly castigated and ridiculed for that performance, but most media outlets chose to focus on her bad acting skills rather than the undercurrent of Christian fundamentalism that informed her entire presentation.

There is, however, nothing ridiculous about the legislation she and her Republican cohorts have just introduced. It is simply a working blueprint for establishing an institutionalized program of government control over (primarily) women’s reproductive decisions, administered by faceless zealots unaccountable to the public for their actions. That is the “compassion” that pregnant people can expect from a renewed Trump administration.

RELATED STORY: Trump's answers on abortion are somehow getting even worse Campaign Action