Tim Walz is wrong. Project 2025 doesn’t call for pregnant women to register with a federal agency

Democrats are growing bolder in their warnings about Project 2025.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, said Sept. 14 the project would require women to register with the federal government when they become pregnant.

"By the way, Project 2025. Some of you want to know, in there, they've got a national pregnancy coordinator that tracks all pregnancies," Walz told the crowd in Superior, Wisconsin. 

"Think about what they're saying in Project 2025, you're going to have to register with a new federal agency when you get pregnant," he added.

Walz’s claim is a new version of something Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have been saying for weeks: that the 900-page presidential transition document calls for monitoring each woman’s pregnancy.

It doesn’t. Walz is describing a policy that doesn’t exist.

Project 2025 spokesperson Ellen Keenan told PolitiFact the claim was "completely false and ridiculous."

The Harris-Walz campaign did not offer comment for this fact-check.

Project 2025 is a conservative presidential transition document filled with policy recommendations for the next Republican administration. It was developed by the Heritage Foundation think tank, with contributions from dozens of other conservative organizations and at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration.

The manual proposes stronger state-based abortion data as part of its broader push to refashion the Health and Human Services Department into a "Department of Life." But it’s far short of what Walz described.

Project 2025 would withhold federal money from states that don’t report abortion data to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document calls for the Health and Human Services Department to "use every available tool, including the cutting of funds," to ensure states reporting the following:

• The number of abortions within their borders.

• The weeks of gestation the abortion took place.

• The reason for the abortion.

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• The pregnant woman’s state of residence.

• The method of the abortion.

It says these statistics should be separated by category, including spontaneous miscarriage, treatments that incidentally result in fetal death (such as chemotherapy), stillbirths and induced abortion. 

States are not required to submit abortion data to the CDC, but the majority do, except for California, Maryland and New Hampshire. To collect individual state data, most state vital statistics agencies have designed a form that abortion providers use for reporting.

The Project 2025 document does not call for a new federal agency for pregnancy registration. Women would not need to notify the state or federal government when they become pregnant.

Walz’s description of a "national pregnancy coordinator" appears to twist another Project 2025 proposal that would refocus the mission of an office in the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Project 2025 proposes renaming the agency’s Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment as the Office of Women, Children and Families. It would designate the existing senior gender coordinator as the "pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families," and eliminate the agency’s "more than 180 gender advisors and points of contact."

The office’s senior gender coordinator currently oversees gender equality policy and programming. The document does not mention adding pregnancy monitoring to the role.

Former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, which overlaps with some of his ideas but not all of them. These ideas do not appear on Trump’s agenda. 

When Trump was asked in April whether states should monitor or punish women who have illegal abortions, Trump said some states "might" choose to do that and that it was up to them.

Walz said that Project 2025 requires women to register with a new federal agency if they get pregnant.

The manual does not mention, nor call for, a new federal agency to be created for pregnancy registration.

The policy document recommends that states provide more detailed and consistent abortion reporting to the federal government. It calls for more information about how and when abortions took place, as well as details about other manners of fetal death, such as miscarriages and stillbirths.

We rate this claim False.

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