Project 2025 Is Twisting Disability Rights Law to Attack Abortion – Mother Jones

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Challenge 2025, the Heritage Basis’s guidebook for Republican management of the presidency and Congress, is, unsurprisingly, coming for abortion rights. However in a brand new twist, they wish to use a key incapacity rights regulation to do it.

In Challenge 2025’s plan for the Division of Well being and Human Providers, Roger Severino, a former Trump administration HHS official, writes the next:

The plain actuality of abortion is that it doesn’t at all times end in a lifeless child, and these born-alive infants are left to die. HHS ought to use EMTALA and Part 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits incapacity discrimination, to research cases of infants born alive and left untreated in lined hospitals.

The premise of Severino’s claims, says Marissa Ditkowsky, the Nationwide Partnership for Ladies & Households‘ incapacity financial justice counsel, is a fabrication.

“It’s at all times regarding when individuals repeat medical myths to attain political factors,” Ditkowsky says. “It’s much more regarding when disabled persons are used as a political soccer with out consulting or actually centering us.”

Part 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is a landmark piece of federal incapacity rights laws that protects disabled individuals from discrimination on the idea of their incapacity. The activism that led to its passage was one thing many conservative politicians would scoff at, if not demonize: In 1977, incapacity activists and their allies within the Black Panther Social gathering participated in sit-ins in federal buildings to push HHS’ then-secretary to log out on the brand new laws.

Utilizing Part 504 “to demonize pregnant individuals who might search an abortion goes towards the very function,” Ditkowsky says, since “disabled pregnant persons are extra prone to expertise issues” that threaten their lives and well being.

This use of civil rights regulation to assault abortion in Challenge 2025 isn’t shocking to Sabrina Talukder, director of the Middle for American Progress’ girls’s initiative. Talukder argues that the venture’s analysis scrapes “the underside of the barrel” of unrelated legal guidelines to make an authoritative-sounding case.

“Challenge 2025 is about making an attempt to make use of present authorities establishments and constructions to exert as a lot management as doable over the reproductive autonomy of Individuals,” Talukder stated, “actually by any means crucial.”