JD Vance Has Yet Another Connection to Project 2025

Bad news for the Trump campaign: Despite their candidate’s desperation to distance himself from Project 2025, connections keep emerging between Trump, his allies, and the authors of the right-wing playbook for a second Trump term.

The latest one? Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the introduction to a 2017 report published by the Heritage Foundation—the group behind the publication of Project 2025—that promoted banning abortion nationwide and criticized IVF. The news, first reported by the New York Times, comes at a particularly bad time for the Trump campaign. Both Trump and Vance have flip-flopped on their abortion stances in light of the fallout—and political unpopularity—of rising abortion bans. That includes Trump saying that, if reelected, he wants to make the government or insurance companies pay for IVF.

But other essays included in the report introduced by Vance are far more dogmatic. An essay by Jeanne Mancini, president of the anti-abortion March for Life Education and Defense Fund, states that her group’s goal is for “abortion [to] become unthinkable in the United States.” An essay by Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, an organization that criticizes surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies, denounces IVF and delay in general with childbearing: “The truth is that for both mother and child, pregnancy is better earlier rather than later. Assisted reproductive technology and egg freezing are not magic pills to take when you are ready for a baby.” Another essay characterizes the birth of children to unwed parents as a “tragedy.”