Trump’s Project 2025 agenda threatens Michiganders’ reproductive freedoms

(The writer is a Democratic state representative from East Lansing.)

When my husband and I decided we were ready to be parents, we didn’t anticipate the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to conceive on our own. We were devastated every single time we saw that singular line on a pregnancy test, telling us that we would not be welcoming a child into the world anytime soon. It's a silent suffering many women and families go through, but one that’s rarely talked about. 

And as someone who relied on IVF to have my daughter — I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t have access to this treatment.

While Donald Trump lies and tries to erase his extreme record, the reality is his dangerous Project 2025 agenda would give him even more control over our daily lives. He’s running on a platform that could effectively ban IVF. 

Earlier this year, when the Alabama Supreme Court ripped away access to IVF for hopeful parents in their state, I ticked through a list of “what ifs” about my own path toward becoming a parent. What if this ruling had come eight years ago when I started IVF? What if my own daughter one day needs to use IVF to have a family? What if this had happened in Michigan? 

To be clear — it’s because Trump “proudly” overturned Roe v. Wade that we are living in this reality of “what ifs” and women across the country are living in places where we can’t control our own bodies or build our families the way that’s best for us. It’s because Trump and the judges he appointed that access to IVF is at risk and doctors and nurses are being threatened with prosecution and jail time for doing their jobs.

Trump has not only refused to say whether he would veto federal legislation that would ban abortion and threaten IVF access across the country — his extreme Project 2025 agenda would literally threaten IVF, ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, and allow the government to monitor women’s pregnancies. 

Trump and Vance have made it clear that they don’t care about women and our reproductive freedoms, and their Project 2025 agenda could overrule the health care protections that Michiganders overwhelmingly voted to support. 

Luckily, Michigan has a choice this November to protect our reproductive freedoms — and that’s a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz. 

The contrast between these two tickets could not be starker.

While Trump endorses the extreme abortion bans throughout the country, calling them a “beautiful thing to watch,” and appointed an anti-IVF judge to a lifetime federal judicial appointment, Harris has fought to clean up his mess, leading the Biden-Harris administration’s response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and fighting to pass a law to restore reproductive freedoms for women in every state.

And while Vance criticized abortion laws with exceptions for rape or incest and voted to block the Right to IVF Act in June, Walz signed a law protecting reproductive freedom in Minnesota after Trump overturned Roe v. Wade. And I know we can trust Walz to protect these freedoms as vice president because he relied on fertility treatments to have his daughter.

It’s all on the line this election, even here in Michigan — because Trump’s extreme Project 2025 agenda would give him nearly unrestricted power and override our protections. 

We can’t trust another Trump presidency to protect our reproductive freedoms, when the one promise he kept last time was ripping them away.