Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s approach to abortion policy under the Trump administration is a lingering question for reproductive rights watchers despite his past stance on the issue, as Senate hearings are set this week to test his readiness to lead the nation’s top health agency.
President
“It would be pretty amazing if HHS didn’t shift rightward to some degree under RFK and Trump. I think it’s just a question of how far,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California Davis School of Law.
During Trump’s first administration, federal abortion rights were still protected under Roe v. Wade, limiting his government’s ability to roll back protections. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned those protections in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, prompting a dozen states to ban abortions while nearly 30 have some sort of restriction in effect.
Trump on Jan. 24 signed an executive action reinstating the Mexico City policy, under which international nonprofits need to certify that they don’t provide or promote abortion services or counseling in order to continue receiving government funding. That same day, Trump signed another action reaffirming the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for elective abortion, and revoking two executive actions from the Biden administration to strength abortion protections.
Under President
Given that Roe is no longer the law, “the anti-abortion movement has much bigger ambitions” than they did in Trump’s first term, Ziegler said.
“Just going back to Trump 1.0 in terms of abortion is not going to be super exciting to people in the movement,” Ziegler said of anti-abortion activists.
A press officer for Kennedy didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Mexico City—or “Global Gag Rule”—policy marks an assault on the “health and human rights of millions of people around the world,“ Rachana Desai Martin, chief government and external relations officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement on Trump’s Jan. 24 action.
“We saw the devastating impact of the GGR during the last Trump administration when contraception and vital reproductive services were cut off. There was a spike in pregnancy-related deaths, reproductive coercion, and gender inequality worldwide,” she said.
Conservative Hopes
Kennedy in June, while he was running for president as a Democrat, released a video saying he supported abortion until “the final months of pregnancy, just as Roe v Wade did.”
Some social conservatives are skeptical about Kennedy’s commitment to the anti-abortion movement. Advancing American Freedom, an advocacy group founded by Trump’s former Vice President
Others are more hopeful.
“When it comes to HHS, the Biden-Harris administration radicalized its bureaucracy to illegally mandate and promote abortion and dangerous gender procedures,” Matt Bowman, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement. ADF unsuccessfully tried to get the Supreme Court to restrict abortion pill access and has led a number of other similar lawsuits against the government.
“We now look to the new administration’s leaders and urge them to restore the rule of law, respect biological reality, and allow states to protect children at any stage of life,” Bowman said.
At least some Republican senators are also optimistic about Kennedy after December meetings.
Sen.
Hawley also said Kennedy would “reinstate conscience protections for health-care providers.”
Last year, the HHS revised a rule from the first Trump administration that allowed the agency to strip funds from health facilities that take action against workers who cite religious or moral objections to care.
At an event in December by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank behind the socially conservative Project 2025 policy proposal for Trump, speakers lined up behind Kennedy’s agenda.
Reproductive Restriction
Even though Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, the plan is a concern to reproductive rights advocates because it “previews a lot of the attacks on abortion access and sexual reproductive health care generally that we could see under a Trump administration,” said Cat Duffy, policy analyst for the National Health Law Program.
The Project 2025 proposal also backs requiring that abortion medication be dispensed in person.
A Guttmacher Institute report said medication accounts for 63% of all abortions in the US, and a WeCount report found in the final months of 2023, nearly 20% of US abortions were telehealth abortions via mailed pills.
Requiring mifepristone to be dispensed in person would “massively curtail access to medication abortion” in the US, Duffy said.
“No matter what campaign promises Trump made claiming he was not going to attack reproductive freedom, we always knew his intentions were to implement Project 2025,” Ryan Stitzlein, Reproductive Freedom for All’s vice president of political and government relations, said in a statement.
“Kennedy will just be another ‘yes-man,’ ready to take marching orders from Trump,” Stitzlein said.
Leon Rodriguez, who served under the Obama administration’s HHS Office for Civil Rights, said Section 1557 is vulnerable, and that conscience protections could return to their first Trump administration state.
Biden’s 1557 rule likewise interprets the ACA as protecting transgender people from health-care discrimination. Trump on his first day back in office issued an executive order stating that US policy will recognize two sexes and not include gender identity.
As for Kennedy, “‘the most they may need from for him is just to stay out of the way,” Rodriguez said, and “just not interfere.”
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