Pro-abortion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. confirmed by senate as new head of HHS

UPDATE, 2/13/2025: Despite bipartisan concerns, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confirmed as secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) department. In a narrow 52-48 vote, Kennedy nomination was confirmed, and he is expected to be sworn in this afternoon.

11/16/2024: Donald Trump, who was recently re-elected to serve as the 47th president of the United States, has been announcing his choices for his cabinet. While conservatives have applauded many of the nominees, one person is drawing criticism from the pro-life movement. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), Jr. also ran for president, albeit as an independent until he dropped out to throw his support behind Trump. Now, he has been nominated by Trump to be the secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) department… despite being openly pro-abortion.

Trump announced the pick earlier this week, a confirmation of earlier remarks that RFK would have a place in his administration. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” he said in a statement released on Truth Social. “The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country. Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

READ: RFK Jr walks back support for ‘full-term abortion’ while Biden camp portrays president as moderate

Kennedy had previously expressed what his goals as head of HHS would be in an interview with NPR. “President Trump has given me three instructions,” he said. “He wants the corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies. He wants to return the agencies to the gold standard empirically based, evidence-based science and medicine that they were once famous for. And he wants to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years.”

Those may be laudable goals, but it is inescapable that Kennedy is also ardently pro-abortion — and, apparently, also pro-government healthcare, which is a seemingly odd position for someone who appears to believe government should not make people’s healthcare decisions.

In numerous interviews, Kennedy has stated that he supports abortion without any restrictions, often framing it as an issue of keeping the government out of personal decisions and bodily autonomy. Though he calls himself “personally pro-life,” he explained, “I don’t trust government to have jurisdiction over people’s bodies. I think we need to leave it to the woman, her pastor and to, you know, her spiritual advisors or physician, whatever, to make those decisions.”

The Pro-Life Reply to: "I'm Personally Pro Life, BUT..."

Yet the reality is, the government does dictate citizens’ bodily autonomy through numerous laws, penalizing crimes as serious as homicide and rape, and more mundane regulations, like seatbelt laws. Abortion is the deliberate, intentional, targeted killing of a preborn child, which is excused by people like Kennedy under the guise of “privacy.” Yet no one would excuse a mother starving her child to death because it happened in the privacy of her own home.

This matters, because many federal dollars are controlled through HHS, such as funding for both Medicare and Medicaid.

Philip Klein wrote for National Review:

It is through HHS that Republican presidents have the ability to influence abortion policy, but RFK Jr. earlier this year defended the right to ‘full-term abortion‘. After backtracking, he still said he supported abortion until viability.

HHS would also be the agency through which Republicans could try to loosen the government’s regulatory grip on American health care, but in RFK Jr., Trump has named somebody who has envisioned a sort of single-payer system akin to the government-run public option that was rejected during the Obamacare debate for being a step toward socialized medicine.

He said, “My highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program,” which he described as one “where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody.

One of the moves Trump made during his first administration that was applauded by the pro-life movement was to issue a rule for Title X funding dictating that abortion services must be separate from family planning services for organizations to be eligible. He also reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, which bans the United States from funding international organizations that promote abortion.

Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence recently spoke out against his decision to nominate Kennedy for HHS secretary.

“The Trump-Pence administration was unapologetically pro-life for our four years in office. There are hundreds of decisions made at HHS every day that either lead our nation toward a respect for life or away from it, and HHS under our administration always stood for life,” he said in a statement. “I believe the nomination of RFK Jr. to serve as Secretary of HHS is an abrupt departure from the pro-life record of our administration and should be deeply concerning to millions of Pro-Life Americans who have supported the Republican Party and our nominees for decades.”

With Kennedy as head of HHS, and Trump’s recent remarks that indicate a less pro-life position than before, pro-lifers have good reason to worry that Trump’s second term will be friendlier to the abortion industry.

Editor’s Note 11/18/2024: This article was updated with a quote from former Vice President Mike Pence.

Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.