Challenge 2025 Has Dangerous Medication for HHS

Roger Severino, a distinguished lawyer for the Christian proper, led the Division of Well being and Human Providers’ Workplace of Civil Rights through the Trump administration. In 2017, The Atlantic known as him “the person behind Trump’s religious-freedom agenda for well being care.” The profile contrasted Severino’s sparsely adorned workplace—adorned with a crucifix and a Clarence Thomas bobblehead—along with his elaborate home agenda.

Throughout Severino’s time there, Trump’s Division of Well being and Human Providers weakened the Inexpensive Care Act; strengthened the flexibility of healthcare suppliers to assert spiritual exemptions from offering every kind of medical care, from abortion to contraception to vasectomies to gender-affirming care; and created a Conscience and Spiritual Freedom Division in his workplace. Beneath Severino’s authorized counsel, HHS reduce teen-pregnancy prevention packages and prioritized abstinence in its Title X family-planning grants. Backing Severino’s campaign was his boss, HHS secretary and former Eli Lilly president Alex Azar, finest identified for serving to Trump botch his Covid response and presiding over his border coverage of separating migrant youngsters from their mother and father. Azar got here to name his division “the Division of Life.”

In his chapter of Challenge 2025’s Mandate for Management, Severino guarantees to make HHS the “Division of Life” once more—and to go even farther than Azar did. The plan outlines how HHS would use its energy as a federal company to dramatically curtail entry to reproductive well being providers. Severino pledges that HHS will limit entry to contraception, rescind the FDA’s approval of remedy abortion, and abolish what he calls “mail-order abortion”—the latter by utilizing the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anybody who supplies such remedy by mail. HHS will even give attention to removing packages geared to the rights of LGBT folks, particularly anybody who’s transgender. It will direct subsidies for childcare amenities to folks themselves—all in a punitive, misguided effort to shore up the nuclear household. This isn’t a public well being doc; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an try at making certain public well being by way of ultra-orthodox Christianity.

A lot for “spiritual freedom.” Beneath “the subsequent administration” (learn: a Trump administration), Severino recommends that almost each HHS program or company—with particular emphasis on the Administration for Kids and Households, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, the Meals and Drug Administration, the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, and the Workplace of the Surgeon Basic—be retooled with the objective of selling heterosexual marriage and procreation. He argues that the subsequent president ought to use his powers to “preserve a biblically based mostly, social science–bolstered definition of marriage and household.” In fact, he believes that “households comprised of a married mom, father, and their youngsters are the muse of a well-ordered nation and wholesome society.” He claims that “all different household types” aside from “heterosexual, intact marriage…contain increased ranges of instability.”

Severino assaults President Biden for “specializing in ‘LGBTQ+ fairness,’ subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage”—whereas providing no examples of his insurance policies that did any of the final three issues. Severino calls on HHS to repeal antidiscrimination coverage statements that determine intercourse with “gender identification or sexual orientation.” Right here’s the crescendo: “Working fathers are important to the well-being and improvement of their youngsters, however america is experiencing a disaster of fatherlessness that’s ruining our kids’s futures.”

Thus, HHS insurance policies would “prioritize married father engagement” and stress the significance of heterosexual marriage in all of its well being, schooling, and welfare packages, and it could even allow child-abuse prevention funds to be utilized to marriage promotion efforts. The CDC can be directed to “get rid of packages and tasks that don’t respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine household formation.”

The anti-abortion campaign, too, would proceed all through every of the division’s businesses: “HHS ought to return to being generally known as the Division of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is well being care,” and the secretary ought to guarantee that “all HHS packages and actions are rooted in a deep respect for harmless human life from day one till pure dying.” She or he would see to it that no funding in anyway goes to abortion—not through Hyde Modification exceptions for rape, incest, or the lifetime of the mom; not even through non-public insurance coverage backed by the Inexpensive Care Act. Severino recommends eliminating the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Entry Process Power and making a “pro-life job power to make sure that the entire division’s divisions search to make use of their authority to advertise the life and well being of ladies and their unborn youngsters.”

Severino would power the FDA to “reverse its approval of chemical abortion medicine as a result of the politicized approval course of was unlawful from the beginning. The FDA didn’t abide by its authorized obligations to guard the well being, security, and welfare of women and girls.” This argument is in entrance of the Supreme Court docket proper now, and even a number of the conservative justices don’t look like satisfied by it.

Severino guarantees that no Medicaid funding will go to Deliberate Parenthood. He additionally proposes reversing a Biden administration regulation that teams receiving Title X funds have to be prepared to “refer” ladies to abortion suppliers even when they don’t present abortion themselves, thereby permitting “in any other case certified pro-life grantees” to obtain funding.

Severino additionally goals to limit entry to contraception, which many people mentioned can be the correct’s subsequent precedence after banning abortion wherever attainable. He publicizes that HHS should promote “public messaging in regards to the unsurpassed effectiveness [fact check: This is widely disputed] of recent fertility consciousness–based mostly strategies (FABMs) of household planning…. CDC ought to fund research exploring the evidence-based strategies utilized in cutting-edge fertility consciousness.” Severino requires HHS to ban ladies’s well being amenities that obtain Title X funding from distributing condoms. And by declaring that life begins at conception, his manifesto seems to commit HHS to discovering methods to outlaw IVF, which depends on producing a number of embryos, most of which aren’t implanted. It might additionally get rid of contraception strategies just like the IUD and even some types of the tablet.