Former vice president Mike Pence announced his opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services on Friday, a nomination he said would represent a departure from Republicans’ pro-life platform.
“For the majority of his career, RFK Jr. has defended abortion on demand during all nine months of pregnancy, supports overturning the Dobbs decision and has called for legislation to codify Roe v Wade. If confirmed, RFK, Jr. would be the most pro-abortion Republican appointed secretary of HHS in modern history,” Pence said. “The pro-life movement has always looked to the Republican party to stand for life, to affirm an unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”
Pence, a fierce pro-lifer, also highlighted the multiple pro-life policies enacted under Trump’s first administration, including protecting health-care providers from violating their consciences by being forced to perform abortions, and multiple HHS directives and funding reallocations that supported the right to life.
“The Trump-Pence administration was unapologetically pro-life for our four years in office. There are hundreds of decisions made at HHS every day that either lead our nation toward a respect for life or away from it, and HHS under our administration always stood for life,” Pence said. “I believe the nomination of RFK Jr. to serve as Secretary of HHS is an abrupt departure from the pro-life record of our administration and should be deeply concerning to millions of Pro-Life Americans who have supported the Republican Party and our nominees for decades.”
Kennedy said in May that he would support women who seek to receive full-term abortions. Kennedy later clarified that he only supports abortion up until the point of fetal viability, and his campaign at the time noted that Kennedy “does not support legislation banning abortion,” and thinks that abortion should “always” be a woman’s choice.
Trump himself does not support a federal abortion ban and has steadily distanced himself from his party’s pro-life wing by supporting healthcare initiatives such as taxpayer-funded in-vitro fertilization treatments. Vice President-elect JD Vance said in October that the Republican ticket is “sick of the nationalized culture war on this topic, and I think the best way is to return it to the voters in the states.”
“On behalf of tens of millions of pro-life Americans, I respectfully urge Senate Republicans to reject this nomination and give the American people a leader who will respect the sanctity of life as secretary of Health and Human Services,” Pence said.