How Nominally Pro-Choice RFK Jr. Can Get Anti-Abortion Groups to Back His HHS Nomination

The strongest opponents of Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services may not be public health advocates or vaccine advocates, although they should be. It’s possible that these are anti-abortion forces worried about Kennedy’s ever-changing but essentially pro-choice views. But Politics reports that these groups might soften if Kennedy chose one of his own as his number two. The name most mentioned is Roger Severino, who ran the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services during Trump’s first term — and who wrote a terrifying chapter on the future of HHS in the 2025 project.

Severino laid out an administrative mandate that would turn HHS into a “Department of Life,” using every agency possible to stigmatize abortion and make it more difficult to access, even when it’s legal. As I wrote at the time, he promised that “HHS will also limit access to birth control, revoke the FDA’s approval of medical abortions, and end what it calls “abortion by mail” using the long-dormant Comstock Act prosecute anyone who gives such drugs by mail.’

Students for Life President Christy Hamrick praised Severino Politicscalling him “someone who knows how corrupt and biased the agency is and who has ideas on how to fix it.” Because Kennedy is unfamiliar with the HHS bureaucracy, “they need to balance the HHS ticket with experience,” she said, adding that they trust Severin to Politics“To make sure all Biden-era programs expanding access to abortion are repealed.”

This was reported by a source close to Trump’s transition Politics that Kennedy is “open to requests from (pro-life groups).”

During Severin’s previous service at HHS, Atlantic called him “the man behind Trump’s religious freedom healthcare agenda.” In his “Project 2025” chapter, Severino proposed rolling back some of the agency’s changes made by Trump and reversed by the Biden administration, including expanding conscience protections for those who do not want to participate in abortions. “HHS must … clearly abandon the idea that abortion is health care,” he wrote, and ensure that “all HHS programs and activities are grounded in profound respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death.”

Severin would have no funding for abortion agencies — not through Hyde Amendment exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother; nor through private insurance subsidized by the Affordable Care Act. It will eliminate the Biden-era HHS Reproductive Health Access Task Force and create instead “a pro-life task force to ensure that all parts of the department strive to use their authority to promote the lives and health of women and their unborn children.”

Perhaps most egregiously, he wants the department to commit to policing abortions even in blue states. “Since liberal states have now become havens for abortion tourism, HHS must use all available tools, including funding cuts, to ensure that each state accurately reports how many abortions occur within its borders, at what stage of pregnancy, for what reason , by the mother’s place of residence and in what way.”

Where he aligns with Kennedy’s views is in his disdain for the CDC, which he calls “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” He proposes barring the agency from issuing any public health advice, calling the issuance of such advice an “inevitable political function.” In particular, music to Kennedy’s ears will be his insistence that “never again will CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children must be masked or vaccinated (scheduled or otherwise) or barred from entering a school building.” She adds: “A separate agency should be responsible for health care with severely limited ability to make policy recommendations.”

Ironically, he put the CDC in charge of collecting data on “abortion tourism.”

Overall, Severin’s HHS chapter is a manifesto for restoring the primacy of male-headed families. “Working fathers are vital to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is destroying our children’s futures,” he wrote. Interestingly, he would also cut funding for child care, including Head Start, as part of his Christian nationalist agenda to send working mothers home.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy made public statements about Severin. But the uproar over his high-level involvement at HHS is further evidence that the disgraced president-elect lied in abandoning Project 2025. He is also considering its “architect,” Russell Vought, for another term as director of management and budget . He has already chosen Brendan Carr, who wrote the chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, to be chairman of the FCC. We are likely to see more Project 2025 members in the administration in the coming months.