Fact-checking Kamala Harris on Project 2025 limiting access to IVF, contraception

Democrats continue to issue grave warnings about Project 2025, a 900-page policy playbook for the next Republican administration.

They say the manual, authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and co-written by more than 100 groups, is a blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency. Although Trump isn’t involved in Project 2025, and has tried to distance himself from it, about 140 of his former advisers have contributed to it.

Trump on the campaign trail has most recently said that states, not the federal government, should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives or IVF.

In a July 18 campaign event in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, warned that Project 2025 would take away more reproductive health care from Americans. She also highlighted that Trump didn’t mention the plan during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Harris told the crowd that Trump didn’t talk about Project 2025 because "their plans are extreme and they are divisive." 

"You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are intent on taking reproductive freedoms from the people of America and the women of America — trying to ban abortion nationwide, as they do, and restrict access to IVF and contraception, as their plan calls for," she said. 

The plan doesn’t outright call for banning abortion nationwide. However, it makes several recommendations that could greatly limit how abortions are performed in the U.S., particularly by curtailing medication abortion and the mailing of abortion-related materials. 

But does the plan actually call to restrict in vitro fertilization, known as IVF, and contraception? 

PolitiFact did not find any mention of IVF throughout the document, or specific recommendations to curtail the practice in the U.S. The manual doesn’t outright call for restricting standard contraceptive methods, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices, known as IUDs. Project 2025 pointed out the same. 

However, it does recommend restricting some emergency contraceptives from certain no-cost insurance coverage.

The Harris campaign also pointed to other provisions in the manual, including its call to end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood, which provides contraception to patients, and allowing employers to not cover contraception over religious and moral exemptions. 

In its Health and Human Services section, Project 2025 says that some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. It labels the pill as a potential "abortifacient," or abortion-inducing substance. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involve a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception. 

The manual calls for allowing employers to deny covering contraception based on moral or religious exemptions, and the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which provides contraception to patients.

Project 2025 does not mention IVF or propose restricting it specifically, but it contains language experts say could threaten the practice.

Project 2025’s Health and Human Services section also says the HHS secretary should pursue a "robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities."

The section continues that the secretary "must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death."

This, experts said, reflects the thrust of fetal personhood, the belief that the legal rights of people should extend to fetuses or embryos.

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In Alabama, the state Supreme Court ruled in February that stored embryos are afforded the same legal protection as children under the state’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. After the decision sparked outrage, and led to some of the state’s IVF clinics temporarily closing, the Alabama Legislature passed a law to protect IVF providers from liability for embryo loss or damage during IVF treatments. 

Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and University of California, Davis, law professor, said it’s not true that Project 2025 has specific plans for contraception or IVF, beyond restricting some forms of emergency contraception. But she said Harris is likely reading into the manual’s general personhood thrust.

"There's some less-detailed plans in Project 2025 around the idea that unborn children are rights-holding persons, and it's reasonable to wonder what that would mean for IVF and figures into what the pro-life movement has been saying, that personhood is incompatible with IVF, as well as some forms of contraception," Ziegler said.

IVF is arduous and expensive and involves months of preparation, tests and procedures to achieve a healthy pregnancy. 

A successful egg retrieval may yield several fertilized eggs. About 30% to 50% of fertilized eggs, on average, reach the blastocyst stage – which is an early embryonic stage, about five to six days after fertilization. Reaching this point improves chances that an embryo will implant in the woman’s uterus and lowers the chances of chromosomal disorders.

If egg retrieval leaves patients with multiple embryos, those patients may eventually choose to discard remaining ones. This is the sticking point that critics say Project 2025, and other anti-abortion conservatives, will point to to curtail or outlaw IVF as it is practiced in the U.S.

The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead sponsor, has called for restricting IVF, as have many of the manual’s signatories.

In a June 27 event, Beth Brinkman, senior litigation director at the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy and legal organization, said Project 2025 enables federal agencies to act without congressional involvement against contraceptive and assistive reproductive care. 

For example, Brinkman said, under the plan, the FDA could act to "restrict contraceptives" and reclassify emergency contraceptives as abortifacients. Access to some contraceptives, for example, such as IUDs, could be at risk since they work by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg.

Emergency contraceptives do not cause abortions. The medications are known to be effective only before a pregnancy is established.

"HHS could act to eliminate insurance requirements for contraceptives; it also could expand rights to refuse care," Brinkman said. "And the agencies could try to devolve a type of personhood right from the point of fertilization that’s similar to a recent Alabama ruling that recognized rights for extrauterine children. Those are the kinds of executive branch actions that can be executed under that plan."

Harris said Project 2025 calls for restricting "access to IVF and contraception."

The manual doesn’t specifically recommend restricting IVF. It supports removing an emergency contraceptive from no-cost insurance coverage and the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which provides contraception to patients. It doesn’t recommend curtailing contraception access at large.

However, the document has language that supports rights for fetuses and embryos, which legal experts say could threaten family planning methods including IVF and some forms of contraception.

Harris’ statement contains an element of truth, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

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