By David K. Shipler
Democracy thrives on shades of gray. Few public issues actually divide themselves starkly into black and white. And even when disagreements are unyielding, a government “of the people” needs to embrace a variety of views, accommodate differences, and include a supple give-and-take. That’s the ideal, essential to a pluralistic political system in an open society.
Yet that is not the ideal of the Trump
Republican Party. Instead, in a corruption of yesterday’s refined
conservativism that preached smaller government, it plans to transform
government into a powerful monolith imposing ideological absolutism on many
areas of American life—private as well as public.
This can be seen most vividly in
the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Donald Trump
has disavowed, although the most extreme provisions were written by his
administration’s former officials who are likely to serve with him again if
he’s elected.
The agenda is invasive. Women would
be required to give their reasons for having legal abortions, and doctors
would have to report the information to their states, which would lose funds if
they failed to collect and relay the answers to the federal government. The
data wouldn’t have the women’s names, supposedly, but the very demand would
trespass into personal zones of intimacy.
States where abortion is legal would have trouble making it accessible, because any clinic that provided abortions would be denied Medicaid funds for anything, including providing other health services, thereby putting most of them out of business. While federal law prohibits payment for abortions by Medicaid, which covers low-income Americans, clinics can be reimbursed for other health care. This would be a back-door way of virtually banning abortion nationwide.
