The Family Research Council, an extreme anti-LGBTQ group and Project 2025 partner, is leading a new initiative called the “Platform Integrity Project” calling on the public to get involved with an effort to pressure the Republican Party to adopt a hardline anti-abortion stance as it drafts its platform for the 2024 campaign.
FRC president Tony Perkins is a delegate to the GOP platform committee, a position he’s held twice in the past.
The Platform Integrity Project website reads, “The GOP Platform has a strong pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom track record. Encourage your state’s delegates to protect these fundamental issues when they meet in Milwaukee to draft the new Platform July 8 and 9."
According to the site, which includes a prayer for “state delegates and other officials” writing the new party platform to receive God-given “wisdom and discernment,” the initiative is backed by more than 20 other conservative groups.
This push comes amidst an intense intra-party fight over the GOP party platform as the Republican National Convention approaches. The platform has not been updated since the 2016 election, before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a coalition of 10 conservative groups, including the Family Research Council, sent a letter to former President Donald Trump in June urging him to “make clear that you do not intend to weaken the pro-life plank,” while also praising him as “the most pro-life president in American history.” Other signatories of the letter include anti-abortion leaders from Project 2025 partners like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Concerned Women for America.
According to a report from Semafor, the RNC will break from “decades-long precedent” to formulate its platform behind closed doors this year, prompting frustration among committee members as well as conservative movement leaders.
As a platform delegate, Perkins will be in the room. In a May 21 speech to the Muskegon County, Michigan, GOP posted to Perkins’ YouTube page, the FRC president warned that Republicans are choosing to “retreat” from abortion and instructed them to instead commit to an “inflexible” anti-choice stance for 2024.
Reporting indicates that some at the RNC and in President Trump’s inner circle see taking a hardline as a mistake. According to NBC News, the campaign is taking an active role in stopping the party from moving what it sees as too far right on abortion and marriage. And according to the Times, “In the two years since the Supreme Court that Mr. Trump transformed decided to overturn Roe, he has grown ever more convinced that hard-line abortion restrictions are electoral poison."
That’s not to say that Trump is not an anti-abortion extremist. He has reportedly expressed private support for a national 16-week abortion ban and in the 2016 campaign made a promise to sign a 20-week abortion ban into law. He has taken credit for appointing the justices that voted to overturn Roe, and as president took steps to curtail abortion access.
FRC has also recruited the support of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who recently told Perkins in an interview, “I think it’s a mistake for Republicans to avoid such an important critical issue. And I know it’s controversial,” adding “I think it is so central to who we are as Americans to understand the value of every human life."
Project 2025, of which FRC is a partner organization, is an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration. The effort involves more than 100 partner organizations, and its nearly 900-page policy book — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — represents a major threat to democracy.
Media Matters has extensively documented Project 2025’s extreme anti-reproductive rights agenda. Project 2025 has laid out policy plans in their Mandate for Leadership to heavily restrict access to abortion and contraceptives, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing approval of abortion medications, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. Partner organizations of Project 2025, like anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America, have gone even further in encouraging bans on abortion and contraceptives and even suggesting limiting access to or banning IVF and surrogacy.
