Project 2025 in the original German

All fascist regimes try to gain control over women’s bodies.

As we head toward the 2024 presidential election, let’s focus on one undeniable fact: 13 states have banned abortion. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. Women who are victims of incest or rape cannot get an abortion nine states. The Heritage Foundation supports even more extensive restrictions in Project 2025. Of course, control over reproductive choices was a central tenet of authoritarian regimes, including Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was also one of the first pages of the Nazi playbook, representing a conservative response to the significant progress women in Germany had made in education, employment and sexual independence over the past decade.

Four months after Hitler took power, women lost their reproductive rights. Abortion, which had been decriminalized in 1927 – a time when pregnancy often endangered a woman’s life – was banned entirely. The Nazi government introduced a law in 1871 that criminalized abortion.

Women’s clinics – which provided abortion services and contraception – were closed.

Nineteen thousand women who held positions in regional and local government offices were abruptly dismissed. Female lawyers were not allowed to serve as judges or prosecutors. Female physicians could no longer receive compensation from government-sponsored insurance plans. A new quota limited the number of women who could attend a German university. In 1932 – the year before Hitler came to power – 18,315 women were enrolled in German universities; in 1938 there were 5,447. The curriculum for girls in secondary school was updated to focus on cooking, cleaning and repairing. Kindersegen– women blessed with children – were celebrated as national heroines.

In an impassioned speech, Hitler criticized “women’s emancipation”: “We do not consider it right for women to invade man’s world, to enter his territory; instead, we consider it normal for these worlds to remain separate.” Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels echoed this idea in a speech of his own: “The first, best and most appropriate place for woman is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to bear children.”

Nazi policies encouraged a return to traditional gender roles by encouraging women to give up their careers. Under the terms of the 1933 Marriage Promotion Act, couples could receive a government loan of 1,000 Reichsmarks if a working woman quit her job. If she did not have children, the couple had to pay back the full amount. If she gave birth to one child, the couple received a credit of 250 Reichsmarks; if she had two babies, 500 Reichsmarks; if she got three, 750 Reichsmarks. The entire loan was forgiven the day she had her fourth child. Nazi propaganda fetishized the peasant woman as the feminine ideal. Images of young, blonde women in peasant clothes cradling babies spread on posters, magazines and newspapers. “German men want real German women again,” said a Nazi manual from 1933.

The abortion laws in Nazi Germany undoubtedly reflected a deeply misogynistic ideology. The pronatalist agenda that underpinned the legislation was also unquestionably racist. Alarmed by the declining birth rate in Germany, Hitler and his lackeys believed that only “racially pure” women belonging to the so-called Aryan race should be allowed to have children. Abortion was allowed for Jews.

Project 2025 calls for the implementation of a national surveillance program overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to identify women seeking abortions in all fifty states. “HHS should use every tool available, including cutting funding, to ensure that each state reports exactly how many abortions occur within its borders, at what gestational age the child is, for what reason, what state the mother lives in, and by what method.” Each state would also be required to submit data on spontaneous miscarriages, stillbirths and induced abortions and “ensure that statistics are separated by category.” This language is alarmingly reminiscent of a mandate introduced by the Nazi regime in 1935 that required hospitals to submit detailed reports on every premature birth, miscarriage and termination of pregnancy. Gestapo files were filled with the names, addresses and occupations of women suspected of aborting their fetuses, the dates of their procedures and the instruments used to perform them.

In 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler was appalled by a report that an estimated 600,000 illegal abortions were performed in Germany each year. Surveillance efforts were intensified. The prison sentences were extended. The 1943 Protection of Marriage, Family and Maternity Act introduced the death penalty for doctors and anyone who dared to perform an abortion. Yet women continued to terminate their pregnancies.

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The same is true today in the United States. Despite abortion bans across the country, More than 1 million abortions were performed in 2023an increase of 11 percent since 2020.

While comparisons between Nazi Germany and the United States may provide easy and decidedly false analogies, there is ample reason for concern. Fringe neofascists and mainstream Republicans share the belief that women should not have sovereignty over their own bodies. That includes Project 2025’s coalition of 100 conservative organizations, which have united to support a massive expansion of presidential power. Trump brags that he will abolish the Constitution if he is re-elected president, and what was once unimaginable awaits us.

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Control over women’s reproductive choices is a harbinger of a larger-scale attack on democracy. This is no time for complacency.

Can we count on you?

In the upcoming elections, the fate of our democracy and basic civil rights are at stake. The conservative architects of Project 2025 plan to internalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision at all levels of government should he win.

We have already seen events that fill us with both fear and cautious optimism. The nation has been a bulwark against disinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers caught up with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, discussed JD Vance’s shallow right-wing populist appeals, and debated the path to a Democratic victory in November.

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The editorial staff of The nation

Rebecca Donner

Rebecca Donner is a 2023–24 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller All the frequent problems of our days: the American woman at the heart of the German resistance against Hitlerwhich won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Award.

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