Project 2025: How Christian Nationalist Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs Arm the CDC for Surveillance
From miscarriages to LGBTQIA+ treatments, Christo-fascists are coming for you (Scroll to the end to listen)
We have a lot of Project 2025 text to cover today. Because when Christo-fascist Republicans outline their aims this plainly, we should read their words.
Before we look at the text, let’s discuss the concept of a sincerely held religious belief. We hear that term often when discussing vaccines, hiring or working with LGBTQIA+ people, taxpayer funding for abortion and contraception and more. But what is a sincerely held religious belief? How does one gauge another person’s sincerity?
According to NPR, we have several generally accepted guidelines for assessing the sincerity of one’s religious belief.
"Those factors can include whether the employee's behavior is inconsistent with the professed belief; the accommodation constitutes a desirable benefit likely to be sought for secular reasons; the timing of the request renders it suspect; or the employer has an objective reason to believe the accommodation is not sought for religious reasons," she explains.
Employers can request additional information from the employee, such as asking whether they take other medicines that also used fetal cells in their development, like Tylenol or Motrin.
Project 2025 uses Christian Nationalists’ sincerely held religious beliefs as cover to outlaw abortion from fertilization, undercut biomedical research, and threaten all man-made contraception.
Human life and conscience rights are code for sincerely held Christian Nationalist religious beliefs. Because they believe their faith is the One True Faith, they are not so generous with another faith’s sincerely held religious beliefs. We already see this playing out in lawsuits over abortion bans where one’s faith allows abortion. Christian Nationalists will force everyone to live by their interpretation of the Bible, regardless of faith.
Respect for Life and Conscience. The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation. It should ensure that it is not promoting abortion as health care. It should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion.
The CDC oversaw and funded the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines, insensitive to the consciences of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people who objected to taking a vac-cine with such a link to abortion. As evidenced by litigation across the country, it is likely that thousands were fired unjustly because of the exercise of their consciences or faith on this question. There is never any justification for ending a child’s life as part of research, and the research benefits from splicing or growing aborted fetal cells and aborted baby body parts can easily be provided by alternative sources. All such research should be prohibited as a matter of law and policy. CDC should update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods (FABMs) of family planning and stop publishing communications that conflate such methods with the long-eclipsed “rhythm” or “calendar” methods. CDC should fund studies exploring the evidence-based methods used in cutting-edge fertility awareness.
Project 2025, pages 454 - 455
Christo-fascist Republicans are clear: They intend to turn the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into an abortion and transgender care surveillance unit.
Data Collection. The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.
In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion. Comparisons between live births and abortion should be tracked across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers and whether better prenatal physical, mental, and social care improves infant outcomes and decreases abortion rates, especially among those who are most vulnerable.
The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2023 would amend title XIX of the Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act to improve the CDC’s abortion reporting mechanisms by requiring states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.
The CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.
Project 2025, pages 455 - 456
This section is one of the biggest examples of government overreach and fascist surveillance. Otherwise, how will they track every pregnancy outcome? Because that’s really what they’re saying here. They intend to track every pregnancy to a live birth, and if it didn’t result in a live birth, what happened? There’s no other reason to include spontaneous miscarriage and chemotherapy if they don’t intend to log every pregnancy outcome. Whatever Republicans say about reducing the size of government, enforcing this section will require a massive investment in human and technological capital.
They are also very clear about how they will force blue states to comply: They will withhold federal funds. While a later section cites Medicaid, the initial mention of cutting federal funds is more ambiguous. What could it mean?
Let’s take California as a sample scenario. Republicans sweep Congress and the Presidency in November, and the President signs an executive order outlawing abortion from fertilization nationwide on Inauguration Day. California is immediately put on notice that it must comply with new requirements to report abortion and transgender data to the CDC. California refuses to submit this information because it violates state law.
How might a Christo-fascist Republican regime respond?
They could withhold specific federal funding earmarked for healthcare, which would hamper California’s ability to cover its residents. Under this scenario, Californians could lose health coverage because the state lacked funds to insure everyone. Naturally, a Christo-fascist federal government would blame the state for its recalcitrance, hoping its citizens would turn on state government.
Or they could withhold ALL federal funding until California complies. In 2020, California received $116 billion in federal funding, the highest in the US. If the federal government decided to withhold those funds, California’s government would collapse. The state would not be able to pay its bills. Chaos would ensue. I believe Christo-fascists will force this scenario on any blue state that refuses to follow ANY invasive federal directive.
They make me laugh and want to scream at the same time and it makes 🤯 'every instance of children being born alive after an abortion' - what in the ever loving f..... I. Just. Can't. How we are thisclose to all of us being ruled over by this level of stupidity. Gaaaaah.
We need another Dr. Fauci to stand up and give us an accurate rebuttal on all the propaganda and disinformation on reproductive health care. It should be required on every social media posting that is proving medical information to have a link to a fact-based information site. Disinformation is NOT freedom of speech. Facebook should run public service ads for free. Television used to be required to show “alternative” information WHICH WE KNOW ARE FACTS.
Since Americans would rather take the “advice” from Samantha on Tik Tok. These safe guards must be implemented.