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Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz falsely claimed that Project 2025 calls for the tracking of “all pregnancies” and would require people “to register with a new federal agency” upon getting pregnant. The conservative playbook advocates the reporting of all miscarriages and abortions but does not stipulate the monitoring of all pregnancies.
Walz, the governor of Minnesota, inaccurately described Project 2025’s policies at a rally in Superior, Wisconsin, on Sept. 14. “By the way, Project 2025. … They’ve got a national pregnancy coordinator that tracks all pregnancies,” he said. He then went further to claim that if the ideas in the plan were implemented, people would have to let the government know every time they get pregnant.
“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? This is personal, people,” he said.
Three days later, at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, Walz similarly said: “Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion ban.”
As PolitiFact and others have noted, no such policy is included in Project 2025’s 887-page book. What Project 2025 recommends, as we’ve written previously and as we will explain in more detail below, is to expand the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s abortion data collection from states and to make it mandatory. Currently, states are not required to report abortion data to the CDC, but most of them, including Minnesota, do.
Project 2025, which was funded and led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, is meant to be a plan for “the next conservative President.” Many of those who worked on Project 2025 have close ties with former President Donald Trump, but the Republican presidential nominee has said he has “nothing to do with” it. Trump’s campaign has stressed the plan “should not be associated with the campaign.”
As we’ve written, the plan includes proposals to significantly curtail abortion rights. It calls for the president to “enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support” and deploy “existing federal powers to protect innocent life.” The playbook suggests blocking the mailing of abortion pills, which are used in more than half of U.S. abortions, by enforcing an anti-vice law from 1873; ending mandatory insurance coverage of the emergency contraceptive Ella; and ending federal funding for “Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers.” (Planned Parenthood provides many services, including tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screenings and contraception services, but Republicans have long sought to eliminate funding for the organization, because it provides abortion services.)
The plan even calls for deleting the word “abortion” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.” But it doesn’t force families to disclose their pregnancies to a federal agency.
Walz’s inaccurate claims come after a series of similar statements by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, over the summer.
At the Democratic National Convention, on Aug. 22, Harris said Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” As we wrote at the time, Trump hasn’t proposed that, but some of it matches what’s in Project 2025. Days later, on X, she went further, falsely saying that “Trump’s Project 2025” included “monitoring pregnancies and prosecuting women if they have an abortion.”
On Sept. 9, the campaign released an ad that says Project 2025 would “require states to monitor women’s pregnancies” and “bans abortions.” And during the presidential debate, on Sept. 10, the vice president said: “Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.”
There is no mention in Project 2025 about prosecuting women who had abortions, and a spokesperson for the plan told us “there is no call for a national abortion ban in any form.” That’s true, although, as we just described, the proposal suggests numerous policy changes to curtail access to abortion. And again, the plan does not propose monitoring all pregnancies.
The Project 2025 spokesperson directed us to a Sept. 10 X post by Roger Severino, a Heritage Foundation vice president who authored the relevant section on abortion and who led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights under Trump.
Claims that Project 2025 “would establish a ‘national abortion monitor’” are “[f]alse,” Severino said in the post. The plan “merely recommends CDC restore the decades-long practice of compiling *anonymous* abortion statistics for all states,” he wrote, adding that the Harris-Walz campaign claims were “hypocritical” and “misleading” since Minnesota already collects such data.
To be clear, it has never been mandatory for states to report abortion data, although in the past, the CDC received data from or estimated the number of legal abortions performed in each state. The agency’s latest annual report, for 2021, includes data from every state except California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.
Project 2025 does mention a “dedicated Special Representative for Domestic Women’s Health” in the Department of Health and Human Services who would “lead on all matters of federal domestic policy development related to life and family.”
The description of the role occurs in a section that states HHS “should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.’” But it does not specify any kind of pregnancy monitoring. (In a different chapter, Project 2025 also includes a “pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,” which some of our fact-checking colleagues have noted. But the proposed position, which would exist under the U.S. Agency for International Development, does not involve domestic abortion data collection.)
As for Trump’s position, in April, Time magazine asked Trump if he thought “states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” He replied, “I think they might do that,” but said it would be left up to individual states. Trump iterated that would be a decision for each state to make in an interview with WGAL, an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, in May.
More recently, in a rally in Arizona on Sept. 15, Trump explicitly said he was opposed to tracking pregnancies. “She claimed I want to monitor women’s pregnancies,” he said of Harris. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to. It’s a total lie. I don’t want to do that. Women, I won’t be following you around to the hospital monitoring.”
Project 2025 on Abortion Data Collection
As we said, Project 2025 calls for making it mandatory for states to report miscarriages and abortions — but not pregnancies — to the CDC. The CDC has been collecting anonymous data of legal induced abortions and some characteristics of patients since 1969.
The proposal comes in a chapter about HHS, under recommendations for the CDC, which also include eliminating “programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.”
Under a subhead on data collection, it reads:
Project 2025, page 455: The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.
“This section might be best described as disinformation,” Amanda Jean Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the impacts of abortion, told us in an email.
Stevenson said the text rejects “decades of high-quality peer-reviewed science on abortion,” adding that the language reflects either unfamiliarity with the meaning of certain medical terms or an intention to “misrepresent and stigmatize abortion.”
“For example, the proposed distinction between ‘procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life’ (sic) and the rest of medicine for pregnant people is ill-defined and contrary to the experiences of patients and physicians,” she wrote.
Stevenson also objected to the suggestion that complications of abortion are not currently sufficiently captured. “Our systems already monitor for abortion complications at least as well as we do for any other outpatient procedures,” noting that the existing systems monitor for abortion mortality “with a high degree of sensitivity.”
“Evidence points to our system overestimating maternal death – of which abortion death is a part,” she said. “We have no reason to think that we underestimate maternal death after abortion.” Moreover, she said, better monitoring would require the type of data integration that is only possible with a nationalized health system.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights, as of September 2023, 46 states and D.C. require providers to submit regular and confidential reports to the state. The data is collected in a form that typically includes the name of the physician and the facility where the procedure was performed; age, race, ethnicity, marital status and number of previous live births of the patient; gestational age and abortion procedure used, including the use of medication.
The exact data collected, however, is up to the state — and not all abortions are reported. “In most states and jurisdictions, the collection of abortion data is facilitated by a legal requirement for hospitals, facilities, or physicians to report abortions to a central health agency; however, reporting is not complete in all areas, including in certain areas with reporting requirements,” the latest annual CDC report explains.
Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, told us abortion reporting should remain voluntary. Even though having data on abortion is important, the reporting has often been used with political reasons, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s research. For example, asking for the patient’s reason for a procedure, as Project 2025 suggests, can provide data that could be useful to push certain agendas. Sixteen states already collect some data on reasons for a procedure. (Minnesota used to but stopped in 2023.)
“A common anti-abortion tactic is to claim that most abortions are not for health-related reasons but for personal preference or even convenience, and therefore do not constitute necessary health care,” he told us in an email, referring us to a post by the anti-abortion rights organization Charlotte Lozier Institute as an example.
When reporting is used for political reasons the questions can get “highly intrusive into patient privacy and risk patient confidentiality,” he wrote, which in turn could discourage people from getting needed care. After the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, several states stopped collecting these data partly because of privacy concerns, he added.
Project 2025’s suggestion to collect data on miscarriage is also “unusual,” Maddow-Zimet wrote. Most pregnancy losses occur during the first weeks of gestation and “often don’t result in contact with the health care system,” he wrote, so it’s “unclear how these statistics would be collected.”
In a phone interview, Severino told us miscarriage data would only be collected if patients seek medical attention, adding that Walz’s state of Minnesota has reported on miscarriages.
Minnesota, however, hasn’t collected data from medical providers when patients seek care for a miscarriage. Prior to early 2023, Minnesota did require providers to report how many previous spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, a person obtaining an abortion had. The requirement was removed in 2023 with the passage of the state’s new abortion law.
Amy Friedrich-Karnik, Guttmacher’s director of federal policy told us the group “cannot speak directly to what parts of the Project 2025” plan support Harris’ and Walz’s claims. But she noted that it is “very likely” the document is not mentioning all the ways in which the pregnancy outcome data it intends to collect would be used.
“In the context of an overarching goal to make any and all abortion care unavailable, there are numerous potential ways this trove of data could be used, including potentially increased efforts to criminalize and prosecute people for their pregnancy outcomes,” she told us in an email.
Severino, however, emphasized that the data would be anonymous — and just as important as a variety of other public health statistics, such as the number of deaths each year from guns or traffic accidents.
“Nothing about individuals. Nothing about tracking people. Nothing about law enforcement,” he said. “That’s not what anonymous statistics are used for.”
Correction, Oct. 9: Previously, the story incorrectly said that Minnesota collects some data on the reasons for an abortion. That was based on a Guttmacher Institute webpage that had not been fully updated. As of early 2023, Minnesota no longer collects that information.
We also updated the story to explain that contrary to Severino’s suggestion, Minnesota hasn’t collected data on miscarriages in the way that Project 2025 proposes.
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