Florida NOW: Sounding the Alarm
Project 2026 – expanding state surveillance
over reproductive health data and more
December 28, 2025 9:30 am
Photo: Elena Helade via Unsplash |
Columbia County Observer graphic
By
Julie Kent
The Florida National Organization for Women (FL NOW) is sounding the alarm about Project 2026, a rapidly developing policy agenda backed by Trump‑aligned lawmakers and national operatives seeking to reshape Florida’s laws on reproductive freedom, gender equality, and civil rights. While national attention has focused on Project 2025, Florida leaders are quietly advancing a state‑level version designed to accelerate rollbacks on women’s rights and LGBTQ+ protections.
Project 2026 outlines a sweeping plan to further restrict abortion access, limit access to contraception, weaken Title IX‑style protections in Florida schools, and expand state surveillance over reproductive‑health data. The agenda also includes proposals to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, restrict gender‑affirming care, and centralize state power over local governments that attempt to protect vulnerable communities.
Florida women are already living under some of the most extreme reproductive restrictions in the country; Project 2026 is a blueprint for taking those restrictions even further — criminalizing providers, limiting contraception, and undermining the privacy of every person who can become pregnant. This is not about safety or health. It is about control.
Project 2026also proposes expanding the state’s authority to investigate pregnancy outcomes, a move reproductive‑rights experts warn could lead to criminalization of miscarriages, pregnancy complications, and self‑managed abortion. These policies would disproportionately harm Black and Latina women, LGBTQ+ Floridians, low‑income families, and rural communities with limited access to healthcare.
Florida NOW rejects any agenda that seeks to police bodies, silence communities, or erase decades of progress. We will not allow Florida to become a testing ground for extremist policies that undermine equality and threaten the safety and dignity of women and girls.
The ‘personhood’ bill being considered is an outrageous bill that makes a fertilized egg a human being. It further threatens abortion access (allows a total ban of abortion), criminalizes providers, criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, risks IVF and fertility care, risks restrictions on contraception, means surveillance and loss of privacy, treatment of a pregnant woman may be delayed or denied, life of the mother may not take priority, and a lot more negative impact. This bill is absolutely devastating for women’s rights.
FL NOW urges Floridians to stay informed, mobilize locally, and demand that lawmakers reject Project 2026, related bills, and any attempt to restrict reproductive freedom, weaken civil rights protections, or impose ideological control over Florida families.
Florida NOW will continue to monitor legislative developments and mobilize statewide to defend the rights of women and girls across Florida.
Julie Kent is president of Florida NOW. Florida NOW’s (National Organization of Women) purpose is to take action through intersectional grassroots activism to promote feminist ideals, lead societal change, eliminate discrimination, and achieve and protect the equal rights of all women and girls.