Most figures at the forefront of America's anti-abortion movement were less than enthusiastic when Donald Trump announced last week he plans to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services — the agency that governs federal policy related to reproductive health.
RFK Jr.'s position on abortion shifted over the course of his campaign: In May, he defended the viability standard that was the basis of Roe v. Wade, before declaring his support for a federal 15-week abortion ban and then walking that declaration back in August.
Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, urged the Senate to reject Kennedy's candidacy, calling him “the most pro-abortion” nominee for the position put forth by a Republican president “in modern history.” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of SBA Pro-Life America, the most powerful anti-abortion organization in the country, was only slightly more circumspect. “There's no question that we need a pro-life HHS secretary, and of course, we have concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Dannenfelser said in a statement.
But Students for Life — a group that has frequently distinguished itself as the least compromising of any in the anti-abortion movement — had a markedly different reaction: optimism. For one thing, as the group's president, Kristan Hawkins (herself a veteran of George W. Bush's HHS), pointed out on X, it's often the lower-level appointees, the heads of various HHS sub-offices, who are most integral in shaping actual policy. But, more importantly, the leaders of the group believe they might find common ground with Kennedy on one of their pet causes: advancing the dubious idea that abortion pills are polluting the US water supply.
A former president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy built a reputation as a champion for clean water early in his career. Recently, however, Kennedy has increasingly embraced fringe views without broad support from the medical community, like, for example, his position that Fluoride is “an industrial waste” product that contributes to “arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.” Kennedy said he'll advise “all US. water systems to remove fluoride from public water” on Inauguration Day.
Separately, he's posited — again without evidence — that exposure to certain chemicals in the water supply could be impacting children's sexuality.
Students for Life is counting on the possibility that Kennedy may be persuaded, by similarly baseless arguments, to pull the abortion pill off the market in order to undertake scientific studies regarding the medication's environmental impact.
The anti-abortion organization has sought, unsuccessfully, for several years to convince the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval for mifepristone, the first drug in the two-drug abortion pill regimen, on the grounds that it might some as-yet- unknown and unproven impact on the environment.
Since 2022, the group has submitted multiple citizen petitions to the FDA — an agency within HHS — suggesting, for instance, the agency require each prescription of mifepristone be paired with a medical waste receptacle, or that approval of mifepristone be revoked until studies have been commissioned to ensure that it doesn't violate the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Water Act.
(A fourth petition submitted by the group asked the FDA to reverse recent changes to the way mifepristone was labeled and distributed. A lawsuit seeking those same changes did eventually end up at the Supreme Court, where the court's nine justices unanimously rejected it, finding the lawyers lacked standing to sue. Hamrick says she expects another lawyers to try again soon.)
Students for Life has filed these petitions despite the fact that the FDA did examine the environmental impact of mifepristone when it granted approval to the drug, and found no reason to believe that the drug warranted any concern to the environment — including to the water supply.
Nevermind the fact that the previous Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules (including 9 related to clean water), forget the fact that Republicans have consistently attacked the Endangered Species Act. Students for Life is encouraged by the possibility of working with Kennedy.
“I think that a Trump administration, in the name of clean water, could take a look at how these pills are being handled,” says Kristi Hamrick, Students for Life's chief strategist. The group claims to have commissioned its own environmental study, a fact Hamrick calls “the most un-secret secret in Washington.” The group plans to release its findings sometime “before January,” she says.
Kennedy would not be the first Trump appointee to entertain Students for Life's dubious concern: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump's pick for Secretary of State, led a coalition of anti-abortion lawmakers on a letter in May to EPA administrator Michael Regan, urging the agency to prove “mifepristone, the drug's active metabolites in blood and placenta tissue, and the fetal remains of unborn children — all of which are unbelievably being flushed into America's wastewater system — do not pose a threat to the health and safety of humans and wildlife.”
Hamrick says the group has “started conversations” with Kennedy's team, and are hopeful he will take their concerns seriously. That optimism, she adds, is rooted in Kennedy's performance as a candidate, and specifically the fact he seemed easily influenced on the subject of abortion.
“During the campaign, RFK was the only presidential candidate who said, after learning more, he changed his mind: He talked very openly about how he had actually learned, there was late-term abortion and he didn't support that, and that did make him uncomfortable,” Hamrick says. “It really was a refreshing change of pace for a presidential contender to say: 'Wow, I'm learning more. I changed my mind.'”
