Pro-lifers in the Senate should vote against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. While there are many sound reasons to doubt RFK Jr.’s appropriateness for this position — or any position of authority — the simplest reason to vote no is that HHS has too much power over too many decisions of importance to pro-life causes to entrust it to an unreconstructed long-time advocate of legal abortion.
The 71-year-old Kennedy’s pro-abortion bona fides are extensive. In 2023, his presidential campaign website declared him “a firm supporter of the principles laid out 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade” and stated that “Roe v. Wade served this country well for 50 years. Mr. Kennedy supports the judicial principles behind it. If the courts do not overturn Dobbs v. Jackson and restore abortion rights, he will support legislation to accomplish the same.” (That statement is still live on the Make America Healthy Again website.) In May 2024, he told an interviewer, “We should leave it to the woman, we shouldn’t have the government involved.” When specifically asked, “Even if it’s full term?” he responded, “Even if it’s full term.”
At the time, Donald Trump’s allies recognized this for what it was. Charlie Kirk described it as a “commitment” to “China-style full-term abortion, without limits, nationwide.”
It should surprise no one that this is Kennedy’s view. As a lifelong Democrat who has operated on the left wing of the Democratic Party throughout his political career, he has always had a pro-abortion ideology and social circle. He was published for years at Salon and Rolling Stone. He was one of the prominent leaders of an environmentalist movement that views human beings as a blight. He is good friends with Sheldon Whitehouse. Since the end of the Biden administration, America is presently enjoying a rare interlude in the post–World War II era: there is no Kennedy in public office anywhere in America. We should aspire to keep it that way.
Republicans, conservatives, and pro-lifers alike have always welcomed converts. But apart from a few gestures towards conciliation on the latest-term abortions, Kennedy shows no sign of rethinking his attitudes. He simply offers bland reassurances of something like a truce on abortion. Some pro-lifers in the Senate have pronounced themselves satisfied with this transparent opportunism. They shouldn’t be.
The second Trump administration has proceeded thus far on the correct premise that embedded liberal and progressive policies and personnel in the executive branch require more than containment; they need rollback. We do not expect HHS to attempt to ban abortion nationwide in the next four years; it has neither a popular mandate nor the constitutional authority to do so. But Trump inherits a Biden-Harris HHS that has been determined to bend every lever of power towards the active promotion and subsidization of abortion. Even if the goal of this administration is something like federal neutrality that returns abortion decisions to the states, it will require a root-and-branch approach to break the resistance of the executive branch to state abortion restrictions. But a secretary who is only begrudgingly saying he would follow Trump’s policies on abortion to win confirmation is not somebody who has demonstrated he has the belly for such fights.
That means faithfully and in detail carrying out Trump’s salutary executive order enforcing the Hyde Amendment against the use of federal health care funding, directly or indirectly, to pay for abortions or subsidize abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. It means strengthening conscience protections for medical workers and hospitals who oppose abortion. It means ensuring that the Food and Drug Administration, an energetic proponent of the mifepristone-based abortion pill under Democratic administrations, should apply informed skepticism to efforts to deregulate the pill or promote other experimental abortion drugs. It means using the power and authority of HHS to work with, rather than against, the Justice Department in reversing absurd Biden-Harris positions such as its view that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act creates a pro-abortion national standard of emergency room care or that existing federal law banning the mailing of abortion pills has no meaning. It means limiting medical and scientific research on human embryos and fetuses rather than subsidizing it. HHS has its hand in so many different areas of medicine and medications, and is stocked with so many people sympathetic to the Biden-Harris approach, that it will require both an HHS secretary and senior staff devoted to the pro-life cause to drain that swamp.
Does anyone expect Kennedy to take the lead on this?
In focusing on abortion and other life issues, we do not mean to denigrate the many other valid criticisms of this nomination, including those covered by the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Kennedy’s track record shows him to be (among many other things) an authoritarian foe of free speech on climate issues, an advocate of socialized medicine, an enemy of energy development, an unscrupulous ally of the plaintiffs’ trial bar, an intemperately excessive critic of vaccines, an enemy in court of the first Trump administration’s health policies, an all-purpose conspiracy theorist in areas ranging from elections to assassinations, and an inveterate liar and scoundrel.
Like any gadfly, Kennedy’s willingness to challenge institutions and conventional wisdom has sometimes led him to question things that needed questioning, not least during the Covid era’s riot of hubris and deceit in the public health sector. But we expect more from people in executive power over public health than being occasionally correct.
Many liberals and progressives oppose RFK’s nomination for their own reasons. Regardless of the merits of those reasons, Republicans should not fall into the trap of assuming that a man who has alienated many of his former friends, family, and allies must therefore be good. Sometimes, when you make the right enemies as well as the wrong ones, it’s just because you are good at making enemies.
The Senate owes Trump, or any new president, deference in confirming nominees who will faithfully carry out the president’s agenda. That ought to justify a vote for borderline nominees. But when the Senate exercises its constitutional role to reject nominees who are likely to undermine the president or serve him poorly, whether for reasons of competence, ethics, or ideology, it does him a favor (although one he might not appreciate in the moment).
Trump is already better off because the Senate made clear that it would not confirm Matt Gaetz. Kennedy has his own agenda, and was selected for this role as a political reward. But pro-lifers are a key part of Trump’s coalition, too, and should act like it. Trump can do better. Pro-lifers in the Senate should send him back to the drawing board on this job.