The RFK Jr. Nomination Is a Disaster for the Pro-Life Cause
Republican senators should count the costs of putting an abortion supporter in charge of HHS.
As the presidential campaign heated up, the Trump–Vance ticket and the Republican Party platform made it exceptionally clear that efforts to enact serious pro-life policy would not be on the table during a second Trump presidency. Nevertheless, Trump’s campaign received abundant support from institutional pro-life leaders, most of whom insisted that the former president could be trusted to back traditional pro-life policy aims once elected.
With the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump has given ample reason to believe that his rejection of pro-life policy aims and his promise to relegate abortion to a “states’ rights” issue were in fact quite sincere.
HHS has long been one of the foremost avenues through which presidential administrations enact abortion policy. The department is, for instance, the center of a tug-of-war over whether abortion organizations can receive federal funding through the Title X family planning program. The first Trump administration was able to partially defund abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood by changing Title X regulations, a pro-life victory that was swiftly undone by President Joe Biden’s rabidly pro-abortion HHS chief Xavier Becerra.
Title X funding is just one of quite a few regulatory issues under HHS purview with bearing on abortion policy. Another key consideration is conscience protections for pro-life Americans. Under pro-life administrations, HHS officials have worked to ensure that health-care providers and insurance companies receive conscience protections to avoid being forced to perform or cover abortions; under Democratic administrations, the opposite has been the case.
RFK Jr. hasn’t been especially straightforward about his position on abortion, but on the whole, he has hewed close to the standard Democratic line. In August 2023, he signaled support for a federal law protecting unborn children after the first three months of pregnancy, but his campaign immediately walked this position back, claiming he had misunderstood the question and that he believed abortion is “always” a woman’s right.
This past May, Kennedy repeated several times in an interview that women should be permitted to have an abortion even up until birth. “I think we have to leave it to the women rather than the state,” he said at the time. Shortly thereafter, however, he said “abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point . . . when the baby is viable outside the womb” and voiced support for “appropriate restrictions on abortion in the final months of pregnancy.”
Having RFK Jr. in charge of HHS will be, at best, a major opportunity cost for pro-lifers, and, at worst, an utter disaster. To my knowledge, there’s no record of his position on conscience protections for pro-lifers or federal funding for abortion providers. Given his undeniable support for the overwhelming majority of abortions, it’s difficult to imagine that he would direct the department to undo what Biden has done to fund and protect abortion through HHS — not to mention that his very nomination suggests there’s little reason to believe Trump would instruct HHS to do so anyway.
What’s more, instating a pro-abortion HHS secretary makes it highly unlikely that the incoming administration will make any progress on reversing the disastrous pro-abortion policies of the Food and Drug Administration, an HHS agency. Kennedy’s statements about how he would consider regulating abortion, if at all, suggest he must be entirely supportive of chemical abortions, which occur earlier in pregnancy. But an essential aim of a pro-life administration ought to be undoing the FDA’s dangerous changes to the safety regulations for chemical-abortion drugs. Chemical abortions now account for about two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., and while it’s technically a violation of federal law to send these drugs via the postal service, loosened FDA regulations have enabled women to obtain them online and receive them in the mail without ever seeing a health-care professional in person.
Both Trump and Vance have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in using executive authority to regulate chemical abortion — in fact, both have gone so far as to say that they support legal chemical abortion — so the choice of an abortion supporter to lead HHS doesn’t come as much of a surprise. It is, however, a major loss for pro-lifers, who should expect to see HHS either ignore their policy aims or actively work against them should Kennedy be confirmed. In addition to considering plenty of other noteworthy issues with Trump’s pick, senators who care about the pro-life cause should consider the steep costs of confirming him.