Katherine Spillar discusses her Ms. magazine article, “Project 2026 Declares Open War on Women’s Rights,” with a focus on Trump administration policies’ impact on women and the SAVE Act—voter suppression legislation designed to disenfranchise millions of women across the country in the 2026 midterm election.
SCOTT HARRIS: And right now I’m very happy to welcome our next guest. That’s Katherine Spillar, executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of Ms. magazine. Katherine, thank you so much for making time to join us tonight.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
SCOTT HARRIS: So you wrote an article recently titled, “Project 2026 Declares Open War on Women’s Rights.” And we’re going to get to that in a moment. But for our listeners who may not be familiar with the work you do at the Feminist Majority, please tell us a bit about the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. magazine for those who aren’t acquainted.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Feminist Majority Foundation’s a nationwide women’s rights organization working for equality. We’ve been around now 39 years and have a number of different projects that we focus on. A key one is encouraging and providing support for young feminists on college campuses to learn organizing and to impact their world. And it’s been very, very successful in seeing young feminists become a real factor in elections, for example. And of course we have an election coming up this fall. We also work to, literally on the front lines, to retain access to abortion facilities. We counter anti-abortion extremism and work to quell that violence and to ensure that people seeking abortion services, women and girls are able to access those services safely. The Ms. magazine, we’ve been publishing now since 2001. It’s actually almost a 55-year-old feminist publication started by Gloria Steinem in 1972. It’s been a real key source of information for feminists and activists for its entire life and remains that today. Connecting feminists here in this country and really worldwide, delivering news and analysis and perspective on just about everything that’s happening through a feminist lens.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Katherine. So in your article titled, “Project 2026 Declares Open War on Women’s Rights,” you alert the nation about the Trump regime and the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for political repression on all of us, but American women in particular. But before we discuss the next wave of suppression of rights, I wondered if you’d review for our audience the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025, which guided the first year of Trump’s second term, and which by investigative reports, some have assessed that they’ve been able to fulfill or complete 51 to 53 percent of the items on that blueprint, which is quite alarming. But yeah, just review that for our listeners, if you would.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: That’s right. And a lot of what they have done is targeting women and their children in so many different ways. The so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Trump pushed through Congress last summer has not only stripped down Medicaid for example— which disproportionately impacts women and their children—is the government-funded and provided healthcare. It’s also chipped away at the ACA (Affordable Care Act) so that the tax credits that many, many people use to afford health insurance through the ACA marketplaces have now disappeared and people are dropping their health insurance coverage.
It also went after further restrictions on abortion, and they have tried repeatedly, they now have a FDA and a Health and Human Services Administration that is determined to completely outlaw mifepristone, the abortion pill, or cut back its access by prohibiting telehealth and prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills. They keep trying. So far they have not been successful and they won’t be no matter what they do.
They have cut back on programs at colleges and universities and private employers to encourage the hiring of women, to investigate sex discrimination in the workplace. They’ve cut those staffs to virtually zero. So you can’t get anything investigated. And they’ve destroyed the Department of Education, which has been key … and the enforcement of Title IX, which says that you can’t discriminate on the basis of sex in education K through 12 and college and graduate schools. And so that has cut back university’s enforcement on sexual harassment on college campuses.
And they’ve even limited who can get some of the education loans, the government-insured education loans for things like master’s degrees in nursing. So a lot of what has been done has targeted women and children, and women are worse off of it for it today. And that was just the first round, as you said.
They now have a new report out they’re calling Saving America by Saving the Family. It really is their next blueprint for imposing a national patriarchy. There’s just no question about it when you dig into it. I can go through some of the specifics if you want.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. I wanted to move to the Project 2026 that you talk about in your article. Just to reintroduce you, we’re speaking with Katherine Spillar this evening on Counterpoint. She’s executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of Ms. magazine. So in your article, “Project 2026 Declares Open War on Women’s Rights. I wonder if you would summarize for our audience what we should know about the objectives, the goals of Project 2026. You go into a lot of issues, including women’s reproductive rights, higher education, an assault on democracy and women specifically in terms of their voting rights, destruction of the social safety net, targeting the LGBTQ+ community and a lot more. But I wondered if you’d maybe talk about the most important things that are on the horizon in terms of this political repression.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Right. Well and all of this is because they blame feminism for having provided more opportunities and more options and more choices for women today. And they believe it has led to declining birth rates. They’re under the guise of being very concerned about lower birth rates that exist today. They want to allow laws that discriminate against women in the workplace. They see women only as wives and mothers, and they are prepared to offer tax incentives for women who get married young. The typical marriage age right now is 30 and they want to see women marry at a much younger age and start having more children at a much younger age. And so they’ve structured all kinds of proposed tax incentives and savings accounts that would put money into the pockets of families who abide by these rules they want to set up about young marriage and more children.
And notably, it’s only really middle- and higher-income families that they’re really focused on. If you’re a single mother, a head of household with children, those tax benefits and those support mechanisms are not going to go to you. You have to be in a heterosexual marriage where one parent is employed and that will usually mean the man is employed. And so the woman is staying home in order to get these kinds of tax benefits. They want to limit higher education for women. They feel that too many women have pursued a college degree or a postgraduate degree or law degree or medical degree. They want to limit that. They see that again as taking women away from what they view as our normal role in society and that is getting married and having children. They want to, interestingly enough, they want to restrict access to birth control even more than they already have, so that women don’t have access to birth control and the ability to control the number of children—if any, that you’re having.
But they also ban IVF, which seems sort of counterintuitive. However, what they’re really after is a definition of when life begins at fertilization so that you can’t have IVF where fertilized embryos are destroyed that are not used. And so they want to ban IVF even though they want higher birth rates. And they want to get a definition in the books, on the books of when life begins so that they can ban abortion for any reason at any stage. They also, by the way, want to get rid of no-fault divorce. They think that has encouraged divorce and so they want to get rid of no-fault divorce laws. So they want to make it harder for you to get divorced, even from terrible relationships and marriages, violent relationships and marriages. They want you to marry younger. They want you to have more children. They don’t want you to get a higher education and they really don’t want you to work in the workplace.
So it’s a very, very narrow role that they see for women and all of this is their vision of what the American family is.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. And I wanted to ask you, Catherine, this agenda in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2026, it seems an echo of authoritarian regimes elsewhere around the world, including Hungary, which has put in place some of these same kinds of incentives and tax gimmicks and the like to keep women in the home and having more children. Maybe you can speak to other examples of what many view as the Trump regime’s authoritarian agenda here that maybe they’re just cribbing and copying from.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Well, this very much is the authoritarian’s playbook. There’s no question about that. Throughout history and these times where we see authoritarians rise, we see these kinds of laws and restrictions put in place, even to the extent of, for example, in Turkey, where violence against women is now permitted. They’ve withdrawn from the international treaty to stop gender-based violence. And here in this country, Congress and this administration attempted to defund the violence against women programs and take money away from domestic violence shelters and violence prevention programs. This is very much the playbook of authoritarians. And the reason is, they have got to get control. An authoritarian is all about getting control over an entire population. It is a patriarchy. And the way you get control over a population is you start by getting control over women. And if women are now dependent upon men for survival, for the ability to put food on the table, now the men also become more easily controlled because a man who can’t go on strike at his job, he can’t change jobs.
He is more tied financially to larger families and therefore he’s more controllable. So it very much is very much in line with an authoritarian model for how you gain control over a population. And we see that, as I said throughout history and even in these times, that women’s fundamental rights to abortion, to birth control, to be free from violence, to not be forced into marriages, to be able to work in the employed positions. All of those are attacked when authoritarians rise. No question.
SCOTT HARRIS: Catherine, this agenda also seems aligned with Christian nationalist extremism trying to impose a certain religious ideology on the country as a whole.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Yes. And they blame secularism also. Feminism and secularism are the two pillars that they blame for the situation here in this country of declining birth rate. But it’s declining birth rates of the white population, the white educated population that they’re really most concerned about. And people, I think, will see that if they spend any time looking at this Project 2026 blueprint. They also talk about restricting voting rights. You mentioned that earlier. They think that the vote should be cast by the male head of household for the household as a unit, as opposed to individuals with voting rights. Of course, women fought decades for the right to vote and still are fighting. We have right now in the United States Senate being debated this week on whether or not they will be able to impose more restrictions on voter registration and voting by requiring proof of citizenship.
And there’s only a couple of ways you can prove your citizenship. If you are a citizen—and that is with a birth certificate that shows where you were born and when you were born—or with a passport, if you’ve gotten a passport. And of course, to get a passport, you had to have a birth certificate. So they’re saying that those are the only two forms of ID they’re going to accept when you go to register to vote. There’s a major problem. A lot of people don’t have—in fact, over half the population doesn’t have a passport—but many people don’t have copies of their birth certificate. Getting a copy is time consuming and can cost money, but beyond which most women who did get married, 80 percent or more, changed their names. They either hyphenated their names or they took their husband’s last name. And so their birth certificate does not match their current driver’s license ID, for example.
So now you’ve got to also come up with your marriage certificate. So they’re making it very difficult for women, especially to register to vote and to prove citizenship, but this impacts poor people disproportionately. It impacts many elderly populations who don’t have a birth certificate. Maybe they were born at home and their births were never really registered. So it’s going to create a lot of problems where citizens are going to be denied the right to vote.
I’d like to add something to this whole conversation because people are thinking, “Oh my, what next and what can they get away with?” By the way, they can get away with a lot. A lot of people didn’t think Project 2025 was going to happen. And we’ve watched systematically as this administration has issued executive orders or Congress has passed laws against the will of their own constituents, by the way.
Project 2025 was very unpopular in public opinion polls and this Project 2026 will be even more unpopular. I guarantee that women are not going to go backwards. Women are not going to give up their opportunities to get an education, not going to give up access to birth control and abortion. They’re just not. We’ve come too far and achieved too much to be pushed back. But the reason we can be pushed back with these kinds of laws and executive orders is because there is no guarantee in the Constitution against sex discrimination. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been recognized as having been ratified. That would put in the Constitution a prohibition against sex discrimination by the federal government and by state governments. And we’ve ratified that amendment. The 38 states have now voted to ratify. Congress passed it in 1972 to send it out to the states for ratification, but it’s been blocked from being recognized in the Constitution.
And that’s what this election must solve. We must get a Congress that is pro-ERA that will pass the joint resolution to recognize that the ERA has been ratified and is the 28th Amendment. That would give us a constitutional basis against these kinds of outrageous and backward-looking kinds of laws and proposals that’s being put out by the Heritage Foundation.
SCOTT HARRIS: Katherine, thank you so much for guiding us through this nightmarish blueprint for further oppression. And I’d like you to leave our listeners with a website for the feminist majority, as well as Ms. magazine, if you would.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Thank you. Yes. Feminist majority is at feminist.org, www.feminist.org. You can sign up for our listservs so that you get alerts on how to stop all of this stuff in Congress and at msmagazine.com, msmagazine.com. We publish a daily newsletter of the three top stories, a Friday newsletter of the best of the news, and we have a weekly newsletter as well. So you can sign up for any or all of those and keep up to date with what’s going on and become an active part of this movement to fight back against these kinds of outrageous efforts to push us backwards.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. And I think this Saturday, No Kings Day, where there are 3,000 events all across the country pushing back on the authoritarian agenda of the Trump administration. That’s coming up all over the country. You can go to nokings.org, and you will find a map and links to locate protest rallies near you.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: And I urge people to go and take their feminist signs with them so that they know feminists are there too.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Catherine, I hope we’ll stay in touch to talk more about the issues you’re working on and much appreciation for being here with us tonight. Thank you.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Goodnight. That’s Katherine Spillar, executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of Ms. magazine. This is Counterpoint. Please do stay tuned.
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