Project 2025:
A Threat to Global Health, Climate Resilience, and Reproductive Rights
As an organization dedicated to advancing reproductive health and rights worldwide, we are deeply concerned about Project 2025 and its potential to severely undermine decades of progress in global health, gender equality, and human rights. This 900-page conservative policy blueprint, developed by the Heritage Foundation, outlines an alarming agenda that would have devastating consequences for the communities we serve and the global health programs we run throughout Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
While Project 2025 covers a wide range of policy areas, its proposals related to reproductive health and reproductive rights are particularly troubling. If enacted, these policies would drastically restrict access to essential health care, roll back hard-won protections, and jeopardize the well-being of millions of people, especially women and girls in low- and middle-income countries.
This isn’t a game.
Women’s lives are on the line.
Choice is on the line.
We need your help to fight back. Join Pathfinder and our shared fight to:
- Expand opportunity and reproductive care for women and girls around the globe
- Build women’s economic power
- Ensure global funding for our work in climate resilience, reproductive health, and women’s leadership stays in place
Project 2025: Key Threats to Global Progress on Reproductive Rights and Health, Climate Change, and Gender Equity
Project 2025 and extremist politics in the US are attacking women’s health and reproductive rights around the globe. Pathfinder is specifically called out as an organization to de-fund in Chapter 9, which focuses on the Agency for International Development (USAID). We won’t stand by and let it happen.
Stand with us in support of reproductive rights, global health, and Pathfinder’s work to invest in women and girls, building a stronger, healthier world.
Gutting Global Health Funding
Project 2025 calls for significant cuts to foreign aid, including critical global health programs. The plan names Pathfinder as one of the organizations to stop funding. This would severely impact our ability to provide life-saving reproductive health services in underserved communities. Programs that offer family planning, maternal health care, HIV prevention and treatment, and gender-based violence response could face drastic reductions or elimination.
Reinstating and Expanding the Global Gag Rule
The plan advocates for reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule. This policy, when in effect, prohibits foreign NGOs that receive U.S. global health assistance from providing, referring for, or advocating for abortion services, even with their own, non-U.S. funds. The expanded version proposed in Project 2025 would apply to all foreign aid, not just health assistance. This would force many of our local partners to choose between vital U.S. funding and their ability to provide comprehensive reproductive health care.
Attacking Contraception Access
The blueprint includes provisions that could severely restrict access to contraception both domestically and internationally. This includes proposals to limit insurance coverage for contraceptives and to defund organizations that provide family planning services. Such policies would increase unintended pregnancies and put lives at risk.
Promoting Harmful Gender Ideologies
Project 2025 advances a narrow, biologically deterministic view of gender that fails to recognize the diverse experiences and needs of the communities we serve. This approach could lead to the elimination of programs addressing gender-based violence, promoting women’s empowerment, and supporting LGBTQ+ rights.
Weakening International Partnerships
The isolationist approach outlined in Project 2025 threatens to undermine crucial international health partnerships and multilateral efforts to address global health challenges. This could severely hamper coordinated responses to health crises and slow progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
Project 2025 poses a severe threat to climate change mitigation and climate resilience efforts. The plan calls for gutting environmental regulations, dismantling key climate-focused agencies and programs, and reversing progress on clean energy initiatives. Project 2025 would withdraw the U.S. from international climate agreements like the Paris Accord and eliminate climate considerations from federal decision-making processes. By prioritizing fossil fuel expansion and removing climate change as a focus area for agencies like EPA, NOAA, and USAID, the plan would severely undermine both domestic and international climate resilience efforts.
Impact on Pathfinder Programs
If implemented, the policies proposed in Project 2025 would have far-reaching consequences for our organization’s ability to carry out its mission:
Country-Led Strategies at Risk
Our approach to global health emphasizes local leadership and building strong, sustainable health systems in all the places Pathfinders live and work. Project 2025’s top-down, “America-first” policies would undermine these efforts and potentially force us to abandon successful, community-driven programs in the 20+ countries where we work in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.
Climate Resilience Efforts Threatened
We recognize the intrinsic link between climate change and reproductive health. Project 2025 denies climate science and proposes cuts to environmental programs that would hinder our work to build climate-resilient health systems in vulnerable communities. Leaving millions of people more susceptible to dangerous floods, extreme heat, and all the life-threatening impacts of climate change and environmental disasters.
Women’s Empowerment Setbacks
The blueprint’s emphasis on traditional gender roles threatens to reverse global gains in women’s economic empowerment, women’s political participation, and bodily autonomy that are crucial for improving reproductive health outcomes and building a stronger, more equal world.
Youth Programs in Jeopardy
Our initiatives focused on empowering young people with accurate health information and services could face elimination under Project 2025’s regressive policies on sex education and youth rights.
Data and Research Challenges
Project 2025 proposes significant changes to how federal agencies collect and report data related to gender, sexual orientation, and reproductive health. This could create major gaps in the evidence base we rely on to design effective programs that save lives.
Mobilizing a Response
While Project 2025 presents a grave threat to global reproductive health and rights, it is important to remember that it is not yet policy. There’s still time to keep it from being becoming law. Please sign Pathfinder’s petition today – let them know we are fighting back!
Project 2025 represents a significant threat to the progress we’ve made in advancing reproductive rights, gender equity, climate resilience, and health around the world. But if you join us, and come together with our partners, supporters, and the communities we serve, we can resist these regressive policies and continue our vital work.
The health and well-being of millions depend on our collective action to defend reproductive rights and ensure access to comprehensive, evidence-based health care for all.