#Heritage Foundation is a right wing think tank whose members are “animated by their Christianity,” according to Heritage president Kevin #Roberts.
As you may have heard, the think tank has a sweeping plan for taking over (and in many cases dismantling) federal agencies in the event of a Republican presidential victory this year.
The plan is called #Project2025.
An underreported aspect of Project 2025 is the potential threat that it poses not only to the abortion #pill (which Project 2025 expressly opposes), but also to #birthcontrol, which many fundamentalist Catholics and evangelicals oppose based on their extremist interpretation of the Bible and belief that birth control encourages promiscuity and enables women to eschew their supposedly proper role as breeders and homemakers.
As far back as 2016, Heritage objected to the requirement in the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) that health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control. (At the time, the #AHCA included no “religious belief” or “moral objection” exceptions to this requirement, but such exemptions were added in 2018.)
In 2015, Heritage president Kevin #Roberts (a fundamentalist Catholic who was president of an orthodox Catholic college at the time) similarly challenged this aspect of the AHCA.
It is thus unsurprising that Project 2025 and Heritage expressly oppose any effort to remove the AHCA’s “religious belief” and/or “moral objection” exceptions. (See Project 2025, pp. 483-484.)
Reading between the lines, however, there is reason to suspect that Project 2025 may also pave the way for the Christian Right to remove birth control from the marketplace entirely.
The plan specifically targets the Department of Health and Human Services, including the FDA, which is responsible both for approving drugs and for withdrawing drug approval due to safety concerns.
Project 2025, for example, expressly calls for the FDA to withdraw its approval of #mifepristone (the abortion pill) under the pretext that it is “dangerous,” as discussed on page 458 of Project 2025.
The Christian Right isn’t entirely clueless. They know they will lose races up and down the ballot if they expressly say that they plan to remove the birth control pill (aka “hormonal birth control”) from the market.
If you look for it, though, you will notice that Christian fundamentalist publications and influencers, such as "Turning Point USA" (an official Project 2025 partner) and Candace #Owens, have begun messaging that hormonal birth control is “toxic,” “carcinogenic,” and otherwise “unsafe.”
If a Republican president gives the Christian Right control of the FDA, we should expect them to use these purported health concerns as a pretext for withdrawing FDA approval