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November 21, 2024
How Nominally Pro-Choice RFK Jr. Can Get Anti-Abortion Groups to Back His HHS Nomination
He can pick a strident abortion opponent like Roger Severino, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on HHS, as his number two.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a campaign rally for President Donald Trump in Warren, Michigan.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The most powerful opponents of Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary may not be public health advocates or vaccine proponents, though they should be. It might very well be anti-abortion forces, who worry about Kennedy’s ever-shifting but essentially pro-choice views. But Politico reports that those groups could be mollified if Kennedy picks one of their own as his number two. The top name mentioned is Roger Severino, who ran the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights in Trump’s first term—and who wrote the terrifying chapter on the future of HHS in Project 2025.
Severino laid out an administrative mandate that would make HHS “the Department of Life,” using every potential agency lever to stigmatize abortion and make it more difficult to access, even where it’s legal. As I wrote then, he pledged that “HHS would also restrict birth control access, rescind the FDA’s approval of medication abortion, and abolish what he calls ‘mail-order abortion’ by using the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anyone who provides such medication by mail.”
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Students for Life president Kristi Hamrick praised Severino to Politico, calling him “someone who knows just how corrupt and biased the agency is and who has ideas to fix it.” Because of Kennedy’s unfamiliarity with the HHS bureaucracy, “they need to balance the HHS ticket with experience,” she said, adding that they trust Severino, in Politico’s words, “to make sure all of the Biden-era programs expanding access to abortion are rolled back.”
A source close to the Trump transition told Politico that Kennedy “is open to [the pro-life groups’] entreaties.”
During Severino’s prior HHS service, The Atlantic termed him “the man behind Trump’s religious-freedom agenda for health care.” In his Project 2025 chapter, Severino proposed to bring back some of the agency changes Trump made that the Biden administration reversed, including expanding conscience protections for those who don’t want to participate in abortion care. “HHS should…explicitly reject the notion that abortion is health care,” he wrote, and make sure that “all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death.”
Severino would have no agency funding go to abortion—not via Hyde Amendment exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother; nor via private insurance subsidized by the Affordable Care Act. He would eliminate the Biden-era HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and create instead a “pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.”
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Maybe most creepy, he wants the department to commit to policing abortion even in blue states. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”
Where he dovetails with Kennedy’s views is his disdain for the CDC, which he calls “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” He proposes preventing the agency from providing any kind of public health advice, calling issuing such guidance “an inescapably political function.” What will in particular be music to Kennedy’s ears is his insistence that “never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children ‘should be’ masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building.” She adds, “A separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.”
Ironically, he would put the CDC in charge of collecting data about “abortion tourism.”
Overall, Severino’s HHS chapter is a manifesto for restoring the primacy of families headed by a man and a woman. “Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures,” he wrote. Interestingly, he would also cut childcare funding, including Head Start, as part of his Christian nationalist agenda to send working mothers home.
Neither Trump nor Kennedy has made any public statement about Severino. But the clamor for his high level involvement in HHS is just more evidence that the disgraced president-elect was lying when he disavowed Project 2025. He is also considering its “architect” Russell Vought for another term as Office of Management and Budget director. He has already chosen Brendan Carr, who wrote the chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, to chair the FCC. We are likely to see more contributors to Project 2025 in the administration in the months to come.
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
Joan Walsh
Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.