Xavier Becerra, Biden’s Pick For Health Secretary, Faces Abortion Politics :

Xavier Becerra, President Biden’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, contended with critics of abortion rights on the first day of his confirmation hearings Tuesday.

Sarah Silbiger/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

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Sarah Silbiger/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Xavier Becerra, President Biden’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, contended with critics of abortion rights on the first day of his confirmation hearings Tuesday.

Sarah Silbiger/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

As President Joe Biden works to overhaul U.S. health care policy, few challenges will loom larger for his health secretary than restoring access to family planning while parrying legal challenges to abortion proliferating across the country.

Physicians, clinics and women’s health advocates are looking to Xavier Becerra, Biden’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, to help swiftly unwind Trump-era funding cuts and rules that have decimated the nation’s network of reproductive health providers over the past four years.

But Becerra’s in the middle of confirmation hearings this week. And though he fought the Trump administration’s family planning restrictions as California’s attorney general, he will, if confirmed by the Senate, face a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees, plus other increasingly conservative federal courts that have backed efforts to restrict reproductive health services.

The leader of Biden’s Health and Human Services team will also have to contend with an energized anti-abortion movement — a movement eager to leverage political power in red state legislatures to finally achieve its decades-long quest to ban abortion outright.

Any Biden administration efforts to preserve the right to an abortion and other family planning services could set up new legal battles between the federal government and states.

“It’s a minefield,” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University who has written extensively about the history of the nation’s abortion debate.

“Expectations on both sides are extremely high,” she says. “And the Supreme Court may force the issue to the top of the agenda if it does something aggressive to restrict abortion.”

The outlines of the brewing showdown came further into focus Tuesday as Becerra faced opposition from a number of Republicans on the Senate health committee on the first of two days of confirmation hearings.

“For many of us, your record has been … very extreme,” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told Becerra at the hearing, accusing him of being “against pro-life.”…