The Other Republican Big Lie: They’ll Protect IVF
GOP senators say they support fertility treatments. But their evangelical base won’t let them do anything about it.
If Republicans in Congress had their way, they wouldn’t ever have to reckon with the ethics of in vitro fertilization. Fertility treatments are widely used in the U.S., and voters overwhelmingly support access to it. But GOP politicians have been tripping over the issue ever since Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos have the same rights as children, and this week, Republican senators found themselves fully painted into a corner by some of their staunchest supporters.
On Wednesday night, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and a pretty reliable bellwether for Evangelical politics, voted at its annual meeting to oppose the procedure. It passed a resolution urging Southern Baptists to “advocate for the government to restrain” procedures that don’t recognize the dignity of “every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.” Specifically, the church took issue with “the number of embryos generated in the IVF process,” meaning it opposes the disposal of unused embryos — a routine part of fertility treatments — because it views each as the destruction of a life.
The SBC vote, which indicates that right-wing voters are turning against IVF in increasing numbers, was unfortunately timed for Republicans. The Senate was voting on a bill that would guarantee access to IVF nationwide on Thursday, and Republicans planned a coordinated messaging campaign for that morning insisting that they’ve actually been huge cheerleaders for IVF all along. “Senate Democrats have embraced a Summer of Scare Tactics — a partisan campaign of false fearmongering intended to mislead and confuse the American people,” reads an open letter signed by all 49 Senate Republicans. “In vitro fertilization is legal and available in every state across our nation. We strongly support continued nationwide access to IVF, which has allowed millions of aspiring parents to start and grow their families.”
Republicans claim the Democrats’ bill is an unnecessary show vote, as Senators Ted Cruz and Katie Britt had introduced a competing bill, the IVF Protection Act. But that bill does nothing of the sort. Instead, the bill threatens to pull Medicaid funding from states that ban IVF — essentially punishing poor people for the actions of their conservative legislators — and uses a deliberately narrow definition of IVF, as writer Jessica Valenti outlined in detail, to dodge the issue of unused embryos entirely. Ultimately, the language of the bill would still allow states to restrict IVF, whereas the Democrats’ bill would prevent them from doing so.
Despite the appearance that this issue popped out of nowhere with the surprise Alabama ruling, Republican opposition to IVF has been percolating for some time as part of the broader push for fetal personhood. People who believe, or claim to believe, that abortion should be banned from the moment of conception because fetuses are people naturally can’t square that belief with allowing IVF patients and clinics to discard unused frozen embryos. Fetal-personhood measures used to be considered so fringe that even red-state Republican voters consistently rejected them for being too extreme. But in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, the Overton window on such proposals has shifted.
That shift was clear in the MAGA crowd’s response to recent presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, who’s forever trying to present herself as the Reasonable Republican in the room, posting on social media that she used “fertility procedures” to have her own kids. “IVF is pro life,” she wrote on X Thursday morning. “My children are blessings because of fertility procedures. Many parents would love to have children. We should not be banning these procedures we should be encouraging them.” Lizzie Marbach, an Ohio anti-abortion activist and former Trump campaign staffer, responded, “IVF kills millions of children per year and then freezes millions more to live indefinitely in a freezer. It is not prolife in any way.” Another Republican delegate from Texas replied, “IVF sacrifices lives for the price of one.”
Republicans now find themselves frogs in boiling water, wondering how they’ve suddenly ended up on the wrong side of the debate over a fertility procedure that the vast majority of Americans support and have taken for granted for the past half a century. All of their reassurances that the party supports IVF and wants to help people grow their families are meaningless if they’re not willing to support policies that actually protect fertility treatments on a national level. The GOP is in an untenable position where it can’t reasonably appease both its evangelical base and the kind of suburban women and moderates it need to win over — and either choice threatens to alienate a critical faction of voters in this presidential election year.