Project 2025’s endorsement of fertility awareness-based methods—which are less effective than other birth control methods—would require nothing short of a national campaign in menstrual and cervical mucus literacy.
Among the priorities of Project 2025—a product of the Heritage Foundation, an organization repeatedly praised by Donald Trump—is a demand that might come as a surprise to those who mocked vice presidential candidate Tim Walz for his support of a Minnesota law that requires public schools to stock bathrooms with menstrual products.
As part of Project 2025’s proposal for a radical reconfiguration of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the Centers for Disease Control would be obliged to tout “the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs) of family planning.” If making tampons available is a punchline for Republicans, we have to wonder how much they really know about FABMs—which are a whole lot more, shall we say, ‘hands on’ than the mechanics of menstrual product usage.
Each of us has personal and professional experience with FABMs. Lynn’s first job after law school in the 1980s involved researching President Reagan’s Adolescent Family Life Act—originally called the Chastity Act. This legislation was passed to promote abstinence-only education in the quest to reduce teen pregnancy. It specifically required DHHS to make grants that included religious organizations.
One grantee, a program run under the auspices of the Mormon Church, used funds to teach FABMs (then called “fertility awareness method”). Intended for married couples, it entails careful observation of menstrual cycles, basal body temperature, and variations in the consistency of cervical mucus, to determine which days of the month a person is fertile and could become pregnant. On those days, they advise, married couples should refrain from sexual intercourse.
One of the books listed as a resource for this grantee included colorful photographs illustrating what cervical mucus looks like—including one of a woman’s left hand with a string of cervical mucus, retrieved from her vagina, stretched between her thumb and her ring finger. (Yes, a wedding band was prominently placed.)
A decade later, when starting a family, Jennifer turned to the first edition of the now time-honored and bestselling guide, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Written in 1995 by public health writer Toni Weschler, it quickly became a mass-market sensation with practical yet radical lessons in bodily literacy.
The book was not without controversy: in 2007, the Washington Post ran a feature about it, posing as a dilemma, “Should teenage girls be taught to recognize the physical signs that indicate when they are most likely to become pregnant?”
A decade later, when The Nation reported on feminist tensions around FABMs—the thorny challenge of eschewing hormonal or barrier methods while recognizing the importance of choices and the danger of seemingly undermining any contraceptive option in our fraught reproductive landscape—Weschler’s approach was cited as “one of the most famous … in existence.”
Now with Project 2025’s embrace of FABMs—cervical mucus and all—it would demand that DHHS “stop publishing communications that conflate such methods with the long-eclipsed ‘rhythm’ or ‘calendar’ methods.” (As the joke goes: What do you call someone who uses these methods? Parents.)
According to Isa Coffey, R.N., founder and director of WiseBodies.org, in order for FABM to be effective at all, a person needs in depth knowledge of their body and how it works, as well as comfort touching oneself. Moreover, because bodies do not always act consistently and pregnancy is a possibility even for those who practice this method religiously—pun intended—Coffey is absolutely clear that the claim of “unsurpassed effectiveness” is without merit.
Given the vast discrepancies in the quality and availability of sex and health education across the nation, it is hard to imagine how people living under the kind of government envisioned by Project 2025 would obtain necessary education about anything, much less complete and intimate knowledge of their bodies. To be clear, Project 2025 proposes to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. This will have devastating consequences on access to basic education in reading, writing, and mathematics that are all necessary to the ability to carefully count, track and record menstrual periods, as well as measure body temperature and cervical mucus—twice a day, according to best practices.
And there’s another catch. Project 2025 also calls for an end to pornography. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts flatly states in the foreword that “pornography should be outlawed” and that punishment for it should be severe: “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Simultaneously, Project 2025 points to enforcement of the Comstock Act, a century-old screed that prohibits the use of the U.S. Postal Service for distribution of obscene material. Given that pornography is in the eye of the beholder, it certainly seems likely that at least some parents as well as conservative Administration officials would subject the graphic education needed to teach FABMs to lawsuits, censorship and criminalization.
The GOP supporters who photoshopped Walz’s face onto a Tampax box—and treat periods as a pariah, much like Republican lawmakers in Idaho who killed a bill to provide menstrual products to students on the grounds of it being too “woke”—will be shocked to learn that Project 2025’s endorsement of FABMs would require nothing short of a national campaign in menstrual and cervical mucus literacy.
Project 2025 is an affront to meaningful healthcare, from its call to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to its specific attacks on contraception and abortion. Equally dangerous is its promotion of the myth that FABMs have unsurpassed efficacy, along with evisceration of the education and tools needed so that people can actually benefit from those methods when carefully and consistently used.
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