What Is Project 2025—and Why It Matters for North Carolina
Project 2025 is the far right’s master plan to remake America under an unpopular and extreme ideological agenda—a blueprint for dismantling fundamental rights, gutting healthcare access, rolling back protections for marginalized communities, slashing the social safety net, and reshaping federal agencies to impose an oppressive ideology over everyone’s lives.
And at the center of this takeover? The destruction of reproductive freedom.
Project 2025 lays out a coordinated plan to end legal abortion nationwide, erode access to contraception, attack fertility care like IVF, and criminalize providers—all while replacing science-based healthcare policy with state-enforced political control.
This isn’t happening “someday.” It’s happening now—and North Carolina is in the crosshairs.
How Project 2025 Attacks Reproductive Rights, Health, and Justice
Project 2025’s attack on reproductive freedom is multi-pronged, deliberate, and designed to leave no part of our healthcare system untouched. It uses legal, legislative, and administrative tools to dismantle access to abortion, contraception, fertility care, and pregnancy care—while empowering extremists to deny care and monitor our private medical decisions.
A total assault on abortion.
Project 2025 aims to wipe out every protection for abortion—revoking FDA approval for abortion pills, criminalizing their mailing under the 1873 Comstock Act, and banning access entirely, even in states like North Carolina where abortion is still legal.
The plan kills the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate and supercharges “religious exemptions,” letting bosses deny employees birth control, Plan B, and emergency contraception. It also eliminates Title X funding and defunds any provider offering comprehensive reproductive care.
Fertility care under threat.
By redefining “life” as beginning at conception, Project 2025 would make IVF and other fertility treatments legally vulnerable—blocking insurance coverage and even criminalizing care.
Emergency care denied.
It reinterprets the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) so hospitals can refuse life-saving abortion care—even if a patient will die without it.
Surveillance weaponized.
The plan demands states report abortion data—including method, gestational age, and patient demographics—to federal agencies. In today’s hostile climate, that’s an open invitation for harassment, targeting, and prosecution.
This isn’t policy—it’s control. Project 2025 is a blueprint for state-sponsored coercion and fear.
Enacting the Blueprint into Law: It’s Already Started
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) is a wrecking ball to our rights and our social safety net. Included in this egregious bill is a provision that prohibits reproductive health clinics that provide abortions and family planning from receiving Medicaid funds for other necessary health services. While this is not the same as a national abortion ban, the impact is to deny patients—particularly those with low incomes—across the country access to abortion care and other critical reproductive healthcare.
The fallout from these kinds of executive and legislative actions is real:
Clinics struggling to stay open
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Patients harassed without consequence
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Providers under threat
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People traveling farther, paying more, or going without care
What This Means for North Carolina Right Now
In April 2025, extremist lawmakers here introduced HB 804—the Human Life Protection Act—a near-total abortion ban modeled on the most extreme goals of Project 2025. It would ban abortion from the moment of conception, criminalize providers, and offer only narrow exceptions. These types of extreme policies are deeply unpopular with voters, which helped stop the bill this session. Anti-abortion legislators will not stop with their efforts to outlaw all abortion everywhere, however, so we must remain vocal and vigilant against such dangerous policies.
With the federal government giving anti-abortion politicians in the states the green light to enact their most extreme and dangerous policies, we will continue to see threats to the full range of reproductive healthcare in North Carolina. This includes continued state funding of anti-abortion centers and the introduction of more restrictive abortion bans.
There are champions of reproductive freedom in our legislature who have introduced proactive bills protecting access to contraception, IVF, and reproductive freedom. But none of these critical bills even received a hearing this last session. Project 2025 is about injecting more politics into our personal medical decisions, not about protecting our health and safety.
Abortion remains legal here up to 12 weeks, making North Carolina a critical access point for patients from across the South—nearly 40% of abortions here in 2024 were for out-of-state patients. Our state is overrun with anti-abortion centers at a 7:1 ratio to clinics and is also lacking state protections to make up for the loss of federal safeguards. The next election could result in even further restrictions.
We are both the frontline and the firewall. What happens here will decide the future of reproductive freedom in the South—and across the country.
What We Must Do—Now
We can’t wait for 2026. Project 2025 is already shaping policy. HB 804 may have stalled out this session, but with abortion access dependent on political winds, future restrictive bills are still a threat.
Pro-Choice North Carolina is already fighting back against the Project 2025 agenda on multiple fronts. We’re pushing proactive state and local protections—like data privacy safeguards, increased clinic safety, and expanded insurance coverage for reproductive care—and leading campaigns to dismantle abortion stigma. We track, expose, and debunk anti-abortion disinformation and educate allies via webinars on reproductive rights and intersecting justice issues.
Our anti-abortion center accountability work includes extensive research and reporting on the tactics and reach of these centers, hosting community film screenings and discussions, and pushing elected and government officials to redirect public funds to real healthcare. We’re building grassroots power through reproductive freedom hubs across the state, partnering with progressive faith leaders to reclaim values-based narratives, and amplifying the voices of patients and providers through a growing story bank and media outreach.
PCNC isn’t just sounding the alarm—we’re taking action to blunt the impact of Project 2025 in North Carolina. Every day, we’re advancing proactive measures, defending essential healthcare, and building the power we need to stop extremist policies before they take hold:
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Enforce Executive Order No. 8 to protect providers and patients from prosecution, surveillance, and extradition.
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Defund deceptive anti-abortion centers and redirect public dollars to real healthcare.
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Counter abortion misinformation by calling out dangerous lies, highlighting the connection between bodily autonomy and gender equality, and building a network of reproductive freedom messengers.
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Train the next generation of leaders through our campus leader and intern program.
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Protect reproductive data privacy and block government access to personal health records.
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Support reproductive freedom champions up and down the ballot by educating North Carolinians to organize, vote, and elect leaders who represent the people, not anti-abortion special interests.
How We Stay Ready—and Win Together
We’ve seen it before: extremist legislation moves fast when the public isn’t paying attention. Staying ready is our survival strategy:
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Track the threat. Stay plugged into alerts from us and our partners.
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Show up and speak out. Testify, protest, and make lawmakers feel the heat.
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Build visibility now. Host teach-ins, write op-eds, and organize community events.
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Grow local power. Attend county commission, school board, and city council meetings.
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Expand the base. Share Project 2025 information and bring in new supporters.
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Fund the fight. Organizing takes resources—your support keeps us strong.
Together, we can out-organize and outlast the Project 2025 agenda, but it will take vigilance, speed, and the collective power of every North Carolinian who refuses to go back.
