Last month, former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump surprised many by calling for universal coverage of IVF treatment, albeit with no specific plan. The move was likely part of an attempt to win over undecided voters who had been put off by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
You might be taken aback to see Trump even vaguely associating himself with the push to help families struggling to conceive. (Trump has proudly claimed credit for installing the Supreme Court justices who formed the majority in the decision that overturned Roe—a move that has had numerous ramifications, not just for abortion but also for fertility treatments like IVF.) Let me assure you that his priority was not, and never has been, the health, safety, or reproductive agency of women. “We want more babies, to put it nicely,” Trump said at an August event in Michigan.
If you need more tangible evidence of the GOP’s stance on reproductive freedoms, look no further than the Senate, where Republicans blocked a Democratic bill to provide a nationwide right to IVF treatments on Tuesday. This marks Senate Democrats’ second attempt at passing the bill, which is known as the Right to IVF Act and was sponsored by Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth (who used the fertility treatment to conceive her children). Republican senators used their own cynical spin to justify their position: “This is simply an attempt by Democrats to try and create a political issue where there isn’t one,” South Dakota senator John Thune told reporters on Tuesday.
Try telling that to the many people whose hope for a child through IVF has been stymied by the chilling effect of the overturning of Roe. Watching Republicans try to score points off IVF discourse while increasingly passing legislation that creates medical obstacles makes me think of that Maya Angelou quote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Maybe it’s time for all of us to believe who GOP leaders like Trump have shown us that they are—and focus our energy on electing politicians who actually support IVF as the crucial part of full-scale reproductive autonomy that it objectively is.