RFK Jr. has a history of opposing and spreading misinformation about abortion
Trump recently nominated Kennedy as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In addition to his history of repeating conspiracy theories, including that vaccines cause autism, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and COVID-19 may be a bioweapon, Kennedy also has a record of not fully supporting the right to abortion.
In a 2023 interview with NBC, while he was running for president, Kennedy said he believed women should have the right to an abortion during the first three months of a pregnancy. When asked if he would cap access to abortion at 15 or 21 weeks of pregnancy, he said he would sign a federal abortion ban at three months.
During Kennedy’s run as an independent candidate for president, he said, “I think every abortion is a tragedy.”
In addition to his decades of spreading misinformation about vaccines and diseases, Kennedy has also promoted the myth of “late-term abortions,” misleading rhetoric often used by anti-abortion extremists to describe abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Kennedy, who in 2005 described himself as pro-life, used his Facebook page in June, to promote the falsity that “sometimes women abort healthy, viable late-term fetuses,” calling these cases “elective late-term abortions.”
In an interview with the Guardian in 2023, Katherine Kraschel, an assistant professor of law and health at Northeastern University explained that “late-term abortions” simply aren’t real.
“It’s a term created by people who oppose abortion to spread disinformation and shame people who have abortions. It has no basis in medicine or science,” Kraschel said.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 93.5% of all abortions in the United States occur before 13 weeks of pregnancy, and less than 1% are performed after 21 weeks of pregnancy.
Dr. Warren Hern of Colorado specializes in providing abortions to people who need them in the later stages of pregnancy. Hern has said that these cases usually happen because “patients have catastrophic fetal abnormalities that end a desired pregnancy.”
“They don’t want to have an abortion, they want to have a baby,” he added.
Kennedy named Nicole Shanahan as his running mate during his campaign. Shanahan has been a virulent critic of in vitro fertilization, calling IVF “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” the New Republic reported in March.
Shanahan’s opposition to IVF began when she was turned away from a clinic at 30 years old because she had polycystic ovary syndrome, making her an unsuitable candidate for the procedure. She told The New Yorker in an interview that two years later she conceived naturally and became enraged at the clinic and made it her mission to explore alternatives.
In an interview with host of World Over, Raymond Arroyo on EWTN, Kennedy said he was concerned about the risks and side effects of the abortion medication mifepristone.
“We ought to know what the side effects are, what the risks are, what the benefits and that everyone should have informed choice and we don’t have that now,” Kennedy said.
Claims that mifepristone is unsafe directly counter comprehensive evidence of the drug’s safety from a global scientific community.
Part of a two-drug regime, mifepristone was approved by the FDA in 2000 and is currently used in over half of all abortions nationwide, according to a 2022 Guttmacher Institute report.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists tells its members that mifepristone is safe for patients to use.
According to reporting from Politico, since becoming the HHS nominee, Kennedy has indicated that he is open to working with anti-abortion leaders. Politico reported Roger Severino, former director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, and Eric Hargan, former deputy HHS secretary, are pushing for roles in Kennedy’s HHS.
The anti-abortion advocates are pushing for Kennedy to nominate an anti-abortion person to a senior-level role in HHS and for Kennedy to restore policies that restrict abortion access, such as reversal of the the Biden Administration’s update to HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s allowance for patients to access abortion pills by mail and at retail pharmacies.
It remains to be seen what damage to reproductive health care Trump could do in his second term. But, during his first term, the former president instituted the domestic gag rule, a law that bars providers at Title X health clinics from counseling patients on pregnancy issues, including abortion care, resulting in the departure of abortion providers from the program. He also rolled back the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage, allowing employers to deny coverage for contraception by citing religious freedom.
