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Trump Delivers on a Project 2025 Promise: When It Comes to Abortion, Military Families Will Pay the Price
If you had asked me years ago what our government’s biggest priorities were in helping military families, I would have guessed, perhaps, recovering from the trauma of war. Military sexual assault. Family members adjusting to deployments.
But in this new era of the Trump administration, it is none of those things. Instead, it’s taking away health care access for service members and their loved ones; eliminating women and trans people from the military; and jeopardizing critical programs for survivors of sexual assault.
It’s the Project 2025 playbook, just as promised.
Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Pete Hegseth recently continued his quest to implement this playbook, piece by piece, by stripping a critical policy from service members and dependents needing to travel for abortion care. Because abortion is banned in the military with very limited exceptions, most people in the military who need an abortion are forced to travel off-base. Previously, DoD covered travel and transportation costs to protect the health and well-being of service members and their loved ones who sought abortion care. But now, Hegseth has removed this important—and at times, life-changing—policy for abortion, leaving military families with little resources to travel for the care they need.
What’s worse is that DoD made this change quietly, in the dark of night, without telling military families. Project 2025 promised to eliminate travel and transportation allowances for service members seeking abortion care. But the change was so broad-sweeping, DoD accidentally rescinded the policy for fertility care too. This led to at least one service member being denied benefits to travel for fertility care they needed to build their family. Members of Congress raised alarm about the change and heard nothing from DoD. It was only days later that the Department hastily clarified that this rescission only applied to abortion. Whether it was incompetence or malice—or both—we have yet to find out. What we do know is that this chaos and unpredictability, a pattern across the administration, does nothing to help service members do their jobs or get the care they need.
As Sharon Arana, a service woman in the Air Force told us, this decision has left deep wounds: “Stripping away abortion access from service members and their families sends a clear message that people like me are not a priority, and that the sacrifices of our women service members are not appreciated. All people, including those capable of becoming pregnant, should be considered worthy of protection by this administration—regardless of anyone’s personal beliefs.”
Hegseth took away access to essential health care from Sharon Arana and over 1.5 million beneficiaries amid a public health crisis. Twelve states across the country have banned abortion entirely and many more have restrictions that make abortion inaccessible. Military families can’t choose where they’re stationed. And they rely on the military for the health care they need.
What this means, ultimately, is that some people will be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will. Consider a junior enlisted service member making $2,300 per month. Traveling to an abortion clinic will now require them to pay out of pocket to rent a car, book a plane ticket, and find a hotel—costs that have increased as more states ban abortion. This, on top of having to ask their commander for personal time off, may mean that they cannot obtain an abortion.
For all the bluster in Project 2025, the Trump administration has tried to sweep these changes to abortion access under the rug, knowing how unpopular they are. Hegseth has also tried to hide his long-standing, well-documented opposition to women serving in the military, believing they are too weak to be in combat. So let’s call this what it is: a quiet, but deliberate campaign to eliminate women from the military altogether, whether that be through changing the “standards” of fitness or enacting discriminatory health care policies.
Service members often say to me, why did I sign up to fight for our freedoms abroad when ours aren’t even protected at home?
We shouldn’t have to fight. But if we want this country to truly reflect our values, the values that actually protect our freedoms, we have no choice but to get involved.
