Inside the Infighting Over Trump's Bullshit IVF Pledge
In August, during the Democratic National Convention which decisively focused on Donald Trump’s abortion bans, the former president desperately tweeted out that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” At a campaign rally shortly after, he pledged to start a program offering free IVF to all Americans, covered by either insurance companies or the federal government. “We want more babies, to put it very nicely. And for the same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes,” Trump said in a statement at the time, citing right-wing pro-natalists' favorite boogeyman: the ostensibly record-low national birth rate.
Then, at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Trump declared, “I have been a leader on fertilization, IVF.” The rhetorical pivot is a transparent attempt to deflect from Democrats’ accurate portrayals of Trump and his party as anti-abortion extremists, and convince just enough swing voters—including moderate suburban women, who some pollsters believe could decide the election—that he can be trusted on the issue. In a Thursday report in Politico, one Republican strategist told the outlet, “Look, he’s never going to win on this issue but if he can chip away at the margins, that’s a potential path for him.”
But this raises another issue for Trump: With his performative pledges on IVF, specifically, he’s alienating key chunks of his base, like small government hawks and anti-abortion extremists.
It’s fairly obvious why Freedom Caucus-esque fiscal conservatives would reject a universal IVF program. Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told ABC “there’s no end” to the cost of the policy. The editor of the conservative National Review has likened the policy proposal to the Affordable Care Act’s federal health care mandates. Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told Politico, “This could be billions of dollars for something that we think has significant moral complications. What is conservative about that?” And, as Brown alludes to, leading “pro-lifers” take moral objection to IVF—the source of a growing rift between their movement and Republican politicians this year. On the surface, this might seem contradictory. But the root of this tension is fetal personhood.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” and their destruction qualifies for wrongful death lawsuits. This prompted several fertility clinics to pause IVF services until state lawmakers rushed to pass a bill offering explicit protections for IVF. But before Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed the bill, a coalition of top anti-abortion leaders begged her not to, writing in a deranged letter that protections for IVF “will ultimately harm these families and jeopardize the lives of precious children”—referring, of course, to embryos. The letter states that “IVF is not a morally neutral issue.”
Since February, there’s been a surge in attacks on IVF from both Republican officials and leaders in their base. Senate Republicans have several times blocked bills to codify a right to receive and provide fertility treatments like IVF. Tennessee Republicans blocked a bill to enshrine protections for IVF and birth control, chillingly arguing it would weaken their total abortion ban. The North Carolina Republican Party’s official 2024 platform, adopted in June, opposes the destruction of human embryos, seemingly calling for a ban on IVF. In May, the Texas GOP ratified their official 2024 platform, which called for recognition of abortion as homicide, punishable by the death penalty, as well as criminalization of IVF. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination in the nation, voted at their June convention to oppose IVF.
Meanwhile, Trump's running mate JD Vance was among the Republican senators who sweepingly voted against Democrats’ pro-IVF bill in June. In August, reporters resurfaced Vance’s forward endorsing a 2017 essay collection by the Heritage Foundation that expresses reservations about the morality of IVF.
Amid Trump’s pivot to claim to be a “leader” on IVF, Vance has remained silent, and top “pro-life” leaders who see frozen embryos as human beings are pissed: “Though we share his desire for Americans to have more babies, Trump’s plan to fund in vitro fertilization for all American women is in direct contradiction with that hope,” Pro-Life Action League President Ann Scheidler told Politico. “Hundreds of thousands of embryos—each of them as fully human as you or me—are created and then destroyed or frozen in IVF procedures.” According to Politico, Pro-Life Action League is one of several powerful anti-abortion groups pushing Trump to walk back his pro-IVF stance.
Of course, Trump is a proven, serial liar who will say anything to get elected—if you think he would actually lift a finger to help anyone access IVF as president, I have a bridge or three to sell you. I don’t pretend to be a professional pollster, so I can’t say whether this gambit—attempting to cater to moderates on IVF, while potentially alienating key swaths of evangelicals and fiscal conservatives in the process—will pay off for Trump in November. What I can tell you is that it’s all a lie: The rising threat to IVF, from which Trump is so desperate to distance himself, stems entirely from what Harris aptly called “Trump abortion bans” at Tuesday’s debate.
In August, Lila Rose, a top anti-abortion leader, said she’s telling her followers not to vote for Trump over his recent, faux-moderate posturing on abortion—including pledging to leave abortion up to the states (which is what’s happening and is bad!). Pollsters estimate Trump can’t win without the support of 80% of white evangelicals. In other words, his gamble on pretending to be both pro and anti-reproductive rights could decide the outcome of the election.