Republicans are still pretending they want to protect IVF, and Trump, a man who believes his presidency would be “great for women and their reproductive rights,” is leading the charge. On Thursday, Trump suddenly leaned into an out-of-the-blue claim that he plans to make IVF free if elected president.
“I’m announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment,” Trump said during a campaign event. “Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely.”
So far, Trump, who tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act multiple times during his presidency, has not offered any details on how he plans to execute his alleged IVF-for-all plan. (The notoriously expensive procedure costs an average of $12,000 to $14,000 per cycle and is rarely covered by private insurance.) His seemingly off-the-cuff proposal sounds less like a serious campaign platform and more like an attempt to quell the legitimate concerns that the conservative attack on reproductive rights could soon come for fertility treatments. In February, Alabama’s supreme court extended its definition of unborn children to include frozen embryos, potentially making the destruction of unused embryos outside the womb — a common part of the IVF process — illegal.
Republicans claim they don’t want to limit IVF access, but their policymaking says otherwise. In fact, a few months ago, Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, helped block Democrats from codifying IVF rights, voting against the Right to IVF Act alongside his fellow Senate Republicans. When pressed on his vote during a CNN appearance Friday morning, Vance chalked it up to “religious liberty” and claimed there are “multiple Republican measures that support fertility treatments and IVF.”
In a statement, Kamala Harris’s campaign warned voters not to believe “Donald Trump’s lies on IVF.” “Because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, IVF is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country,” the statement read. “There is only one candidate in this race who trusts women and will protect our freedom to make our own health care decisions: Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, was a little more succinct. She wrote, “American women are not stupid.”
