The leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services is getting an anti-abortion makeover.

Charmaine Yoest, the former head of Americans United for Life, was named assistant secretary of health and human services in charge of public affairs late last week. (The post used to require Senate confirmation, but no longer does.) And Teresa Manning, a former lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee, is said to have been chosen for the post of deputy assistant secretary for population affairs.

Every administration brings some fervent activists into the fold. Tom Price, the H.H.S. secretary, is also a committed abortion foe, and now, with these appointments, he has important allies in senior positions in his agency. The selection of Ms. Yoest and Ms. Manning is likely to set the stage for battles over the science that supports the role abortion and birth control play in promoting public health.

Ms. Yoest became one of the best-known figures in the anti-abortion world by putting a gentler spin on the movement’s rhetoric accusing women and abortion providers of murdering babies. (Ms. Yoest and her husband, Jack, have been far harsher in writing about L.B.G.T. people in posts recently scrubbed from her website that have been preserved elsewhere.)

At Americans United for Life, Ms. Yoest declared that abortion opponents help women by shielding them from the procedure’s supposed risks. She has insisted that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer, a claim that the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have decisively rejected, based on an abundance of research.