Republicans Own the IVF Mess

One of the ways Donald Trump won in 2016 was by empowering the far-right Republican base. His secret sauce was making primary voters feel they had power and control, that they could essentially turn back the clock to an America when white men ruled. (What some in the media dubbed “economic anxiety” at the time ended up looking more like racial resentment.) Trump also promised the religious right that he’d give them the Supreme Court judges to overturn Roe—and he did.

But what Trump wasn’t savvy enough to understand was the reason Republicans like Paul Ryan didn’t promise the base everything it wanted was because it wouldn’t be satisfied, and most mainstream voters wouldn’t support things like fetal personhood, a federal abortion ban, and an attack on birth control. Trump opened a Pandora’s box, and Republicans are scrambling to shut it ahead of November.

Unfortunately for Republicans, they’ve forgotten how to even pretend to be normal. A person doesn’t need to look any further than House Speaker Mike Johnson, a man who monitors his son’s pornography intake as his “accountability partner,” opposes “no-fault divorce,” blames mass shootings on “the human heart,” and tried to help Trump steal the 2020 election. House Republicans unanimously supported Johnson last fall, and the party is lining up in 2024 behind Trump, who is facing 91 criminal charges and vowing to be a “dictator” (at least for a day.) This is a far cry from the days of GOP nominees like Mitt Romney and John McCain, fair-minded, reality-based politicians. 

It’s clear the base now rules the party, and nowhere is this more evident than in the judiciaries of deep red states like Alabama, where the state’s Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos were children. Justice Jay Mitchell wrote that the state’s “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified,” applying “to all children, born and unborn, without limitation.” The opinion went on to cite the Bible. This fetal personhood fiasco is the result of a 2017 ruling which stated “that unborn children are protected by Alabama’s wrongful-death statute from the moment life begins at conception.”

The notion that five frozen cells are a person and thus should have the same rights as a child isn’t a serious one. But it doesn’t matter for zealots who are determined to wage war on reproductive rights. They wanted the issue of abortion sent back to the states, and the Trumpy Supreme Court obliged. But after voters, even in red states, opposed abortion restrictions, they’re looking for a federal ban (which Trump has suggested he’s open to if elected). Doctors could see that IVF was going to be targeted after Roe’s demise, with one expert telling this publication in September 2022, “Everyone that is following this battle definitely thinks personhood is the ultimate goal—defining fetal personhood at conception seems to be the goal. This is the whole point of the movement.”

Despite what the movement may want, 85% of Americans support IVF. Even Mike Pence, the guy Trump put on the ticket to help win over the religious right eight years ago, and his wife, Karen, have used it to conceive their children, as surely have many Republicans. But when Senator Tammy Duckworth tried to codify IVF protection on the floor of the Senate, her measure was shot down by Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. 

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House offered some nonbinding resolutions, which are essentially meaningless. (Notably, according to HuffPost, four out of the five representatives who sponsored the toothless legislation “represent districts that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, and are likely vulnerable to losing their seat in November.”) Sure, some politicians, including Trump, may suddenly talk about supporting IVF, but that doesn’t mean they’re trying to protect it.

As Duckworth told me in an email, “After the disastrously cruel but unsurprising Alabama Supreme Court ruling, Republicans scrambled to get on the record in support of IVF and the families who rely on it—but their actions tell another story.”

“Senate Republicans had a chance to prove that they truly supported IVF by simply getting out of the way of our efforts to pass my bill that would protect IVF access nationwide—and they blocked it,” she continued. “They turned their backs on the countless people in Alabama who have had their lives thrown into chaos as they’ve been forced to figure out whether they could be criminalized for a treatment that helps create life. For years—even before the Supreme Court’s disastrous Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade—I’ve sounded the alarm that Republicans’ relentless campaign to rob women of their right to make decisions about their health care and bodies would eventually put IVF at risk, and I’m heartbroken that I’ve been proven right.”