This morning, Politico reports that Trump’s Project 2025 allies are scheming to “re-run the Roe playbook” on IVF access.
The choice this November is simple: President Joe Biden will protect IVF access, while Donald Trump will allow his extremist allies to rip it away.
For those keeping track:
- Trump appointed three anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.
- Those justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
- Trump’s MAGA Republican allies in states then banned abortion.
- Now, MAGA Republicans would rip away access for women seeking the IVF care they need to start or grow their families – Trump’s most staunch backers in Congress just released a budget that bans abortion and threatens access to IVF treatments
- Donald Trump has deep ties to the anti-IVF movement
- Donald Trump still has failed to support national IVF protections
Donald Trump supports a national abortion ban, and doesn’t support national IVF protections. He supports states banning abortion. He surrounded himself with those who would ban abortion and restrict IVF.
It’s all quite clear!
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.
Check out Politico’s report here:
Politico: Republicans are rushing to defend IVF. The anti-abortion movement hopes to change their minds
[Megan Messerly, Alice Miranda Ollstein, 4/1/24]
The groups are not advocating banning IVF but want new restrictions that would significantly curtail access to the procedure.
- Anti-abortion advocates worked for five decades to topple Roe v. Wade. They’re now laying the groundwork for a yearslong fight to curb in vitro fertilization.
- Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have been strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.
- In short, they want to re-run the Roe playbook.
- They plan to appeal to evangelical denominations and their leaders to take a firm stance that IVF as practiced in the U.S. destroys human life. That, they hope, will reshape how conservative Christians — and in turn, the officials they elect — view the issue, just as it did on abortion. Ultimately, it could lead to laws that create a patchwork of IVF access in the United States, where the procedure is more accessible in liberal states and more limited in conservative ones.
- “We’re at a junction where we could see a similar generational shift — where people begin to consider reproductive technologies not as a separate but as a part of their cohesive pro-life framework,” said Emma Waters, a senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation. “Many of these pro-life Republicans are going to have to think more deeply about what it means to be pro-life.”
- Organizations including Heritage, former Vice President Mike Pence’s group Advancing American Freedom, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s public advocacy-focused Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission have worked behind the scenes over the last few weeks to distribute talking points, circulate policy recommendations and educate Republican officials and their staff about their ethical concerns with how IVF is commonly practiced in the United States.
- Those pushing to restrict IVF hope the groundwork the anti-abortion movement laid over the last 50 years will make it easier to persuade evangelicals to support these policies, and they’re recycling some of the messaging, including linking certain IVF practices with eugenics and calling the fertility industry “dangerous” and “unregulated.”
- “This is not just about educating people on Capitol Hill. It’s about even educating our own members who don’t have well-formed views on this topic,” said Hannah Daniel, director of public policy at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “It took a really long time to get to where we are now, and it’s going to require persistent work both on the legislation front but also informing the hearts and minds of Americans on this topic to truly see life as valuable regardless of that person’s ability, regardless of their stage of development, regardless of their gender.”
- Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion groups have attacked those measures as taking an “anything goes approach” that “leaves no room for reasonable laws” that restrict the discarding of embryos.
- “We can’t offer a get-out-of-regulation free card to the IVF industry,” said Kristi Hawkins, the head of federal policy for Students for Life of America, which will score a vote on the pro-IVF measures the way they score abortion-related bills. Other anti-abortion groups are already attacking GOP lawmakers who voted for IVF protections with language and imagery they have long used to attack Democrats on abortion.
- There are early signs that their message is getting through to some Republicans. The Republican Study Committee — a group comprising the majority of House GOP members — released a budget that includes language advocating for protections “at all stages of life,” with no carveout for embryos fertilized through IVF.
- Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) last week spearheaded a letter signed by three of his GOP colleagues to the Department of Veterans Affairs calling IVF “morally dubious” and saying that current IVF practice results in embryos being “abandoned, or cruelly discarded.” And Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) introduced a resolution that praises IVF but also calls for “state legislative and regulatory actions to establish health, safety, and ethical standards for medical facilities offering assisted reproductive technologies.”
