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An anti-abortion operative is moving up the ranks at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Natalie Dodson, a contributor to Project 2025, was promoted in October to counselor in the Immediate Office of the Secretary, according to her LinkedIn profile. That means she is in a position to advise Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directly on programs and policy.
Researchers and abortion providers told Autonomy News they’re worried about the move. “The promotion of Natalie Dodson to a senior position advising the HHS Secretary is very concerning given her history of spreading scientific and health-related misinformation,” Daniel Grossman, an OBGYN and director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California San Francisco, said in a statement.
Dodson previously worked at a far-right think tank, where she railed against the abortion drug mifepristone. During her time at HHS, she won an award for her work on a pronatalist website. She also serves as the acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, a position she has held since October of last year. That’s the HHS division that oversees Title X, the federal family planning program that the Trump administration has overhauled exactly as Project 2025 laid out. Dodson seems to have a friendly relationship with Kennedy—a post on her now-private Instagram profile shows them participating in falconry together.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Dodson’s promotion comes at a critical moment. Though Democrats have retaken the House and Senate and promised to aggressively investigate Donald Trump and his allies, the White House still has plenty of levers to pull to restrict abortion access. Trump remains in control of federal agencies, which could swiftly impose new limits on medication abortion across the country. Congress would have little power to intervene.
The first attack came within days after the midterm elections: On Friday, the Department of Justice signaled that it would intervene in a Texas lawsuit that, if successful, has the potential to bankrupt Planned Parenthood.
In the months leading up to the midterms, administration officials certainly gave the impression that a post-election crackdown was on the way. Attorney General Todd Blanche said he would revisit the federal government’s interpretation of the Comstock Act, an 1873 obscenity law the anti-abortion movement argues should be enforced as a nationwide abortion ban. On a private call, Blanche also promised “permanent solutions” to the availability of abortion pills by mail. In a Congressional hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel said he was open to investigating abortion pill manufacturers.
Of all these looming threats, the most immediate is likely the Food and Drug Administration’s ongoing “review” of mifepristone’s safety, which is set to be completed early next year. Recent comments from FDA attorneys suggest that, at the very least, the agency is poised to reinstate old restrictions on mifepristone, which could require patients to make an unnecessary in-person visit to a clinic to get the drug, banning its availability via telehealth. Project 2025 called for the agency to revoke its approval of the drug entirely, which Kennedy has the power to do.
Trump’s latest pick to lead the FDA—Heidi Overton, a physician who has called abortion pills “dangerous”—will almost certainly be confirmed by the outgoing Republican Senate majority before the end of the year.
Dodson’s anti-abortion activism
Prior to HHS, Dodson worked at the far-right Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), an organization backed by megadonor Leonard Leo, who also serves on its board. Leo-backed groups spent millions to move the federal judiciary to the right, and have continued to pump money into anti-abortion causes since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its decision in Dobbs. The post-Dobbs effort to challenge the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in court has been led by Leo-funded organizations.
In fact, it was a report released by the EPPC that kicked off the FDA’s mifepristone review. In April 2025, the EPPC published a paper on its website purporting to show that mifepristone is much more dangerous than current FDA data would suggest. The report was deeply flawed—it wasn’t peer reviewed, and experts questioned its methods.
However, anti-abortion groups and lawmakers took the questionable paper and ran with it: Missouri Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to the FDA the same day the report was published, demanding the agency “restore critical safeguards on the use of mifepristone.” Responding to Hawley in a Senate hearing a few weeks later, Kennedy called the report “alarming” and said its findings “indicate the label needs to be changed.” On June 2, then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary pledged to conduct a review of mifepristone’s safety.
"...it is easy to read between the lines of her promotion: The Trump Administration will continue to support any and all efforts to make abortion harder to access..."
Though there’s no indication Dodson was involved with the paper, she worked at EPPC when it was published, according to her LinkedIn. And her views on medication abortion are clear: At a 2024 rally outside the Supreme Court, Dodson said she was there to ask the justices “to hold the FDA accountable for its reckless and unreasoned decision to remove important safeguards from high-risk abortion drugs.”
Dodson’s “statements about medication abortion do not reflect the large body of scientific evidence confirming the treatment’s safety,” Grossman said.
Ashley Jeanlus, another OBGYN and a reproductive health advocacy fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, agreed.
“Dodson didn’t come to HHS with a background in medicine or science. She came from an anti-abortion think tank and contributed to Project 2025, and has a long history of prioritizing so-called ‘fetal personhood’ over the health and well-being of pregnant patients in the United States,” Jeanlus said in a statement to Autonomy News. “As the FDA continues its politically motivated review of mifepristone, it is easy to read between the lines of her promotion: The Trump Administration will continue to support any and all efforts to make abortion harder to access, and it is being strategic and intentional in waiting until after the midterms to take more meaningful action.”
Liz McCaman Taylor, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, put it simply: “It’s pretty outrageous.”
“It just shows you how deep the anti-abortion roots go” within HHS, and how people like Dodson “really are the ones behind all of the policies that we see,” she added.
While at EPPC, Dodson also contributed to a report promoting “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM), which conservative groups and the Make America Healthy Again movement have framed as an alternative to in vitro fertilization. The approach involves using fertility awareness to help promote pregnancy as well as surgical interventions and other treatments that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says can actually delay pregnancy.
“People struggling with infertility deserve every evidence-based option, not a narrowed menu shaped by politics that can cost them time they don’t have,” Jeanlus said.
The EPPC’s report on RRM was co-produced with the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025. Another contributor to that report: Marguerite Duane, an anti-abortion physician whom HHS recently awarded $8.4 million in grants, as Autonomy News exclusively reported. “It seems quite convenient, doesn't it, that your partner in promoting this policy is now in a place where they are in charge of funding to continue promoting that policy,” McCaman Taylor said.
“It’s clear from the recent election that the public is tired of corrupt cronyism,” Grossman said. “We deserve to have qualified experts advising our nation’s leaders.”
According to LinkedIn, Dodson received an extraordinary achievement award from Secretary Kennedy for her work on Moms.gov, a federal government website debuted in May that directs pregnant people to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. She also represents HHS at the United Nations, where she participates in efforts to get other countries to sign on to the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-abortion pledge the Trump administration created during his first term.
“Personnel is policy,” McCaman Taylor said. “Putting people into these positions where they can even quietly make changes to how our federal dollars are spent is really influential, and will take a long time to undo, even if they're not shouting about it.”
This story was edited by Susan Rinkunas and copy edited and fact checked by Hannah McAlilly.
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