Following Donald Trump’s performance in the September 10 presidential debate — which observers seem to agree he lost — a Fox News host implausibly claimed that Trump is a “leading advocate” of in vitro fertilization, despite his party’s long-standing support for policies that would put the treatment in the crosshairs.
On the September 11 edition of The Story with Martha MacCallum, Fox host Howard Kurtz laid into ABC’s debate moderators for supposedly failing to fact-check Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim that families have been denied IVF treatments since the 2022 Dobbs decision threw reproductive care into chaos.
The GOP’s push for “fetal personhood” laws has indeed imperiled access to IVF — most notably in February, when the Alabama Supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are legally children, causing some providers to halt treatments and prompting loud backlash.
Kurtz retorted, “Actually, Trump has been a leading advocate of IVF treatments, even saying they should be free.”
Fox News has buried anti-IVF stories unfavorable to Republicans before. In June, the pro-Trump network aired only one segment about the Southern Baptist Convention’s passage of a resolution stating that “embryos are human beings from the moment of fertilization.” Contributor Kellyanne Conway claimed the vote failed to prove that Republicans want IVF on the chopping block — right before Senate Republicans voted to kill a bill that would have guaranteed IVF access nationwide.
Several Project 2025 partner organizations — including the Heritage Foundation, which called the Alabama Supreme Court ruling an “unqualified victory” even after Trump tried to disavow it — have also publicly criticized IVF, with some opponents likening the procedure to eugenics.
Additionally, after the GOP’s& Trump-approved 2024 platform was revealed in July, Project 2025 partners and anti-abortion groups claimed that the platform’s language signals support for fetal personhood, threatening both IVF and hormonal birth control.
In August, Trump tried to further distance himself from the right-wing anti-IVF crusade by claiming he would mandate free IVF coverage if reelected, which many of his strongest supporters in Congress publicly denounced, in part due to ideology and in part due to costs.
Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell recently pointed out how transparently ridiculous Trump's approach is:
In response to all this bad PR, Trump did what he often does: He made a promise he has no intention of carrying out. If reelected, he pledged, he’d “mandate” fertility-care coverage for all Americans.
It can be futile to spend more time analyzing a Trump “proposal” than Trump himself has spent thinking about it. He offered no eligibility criteria, no budget score, none of the supportive analysis a political campaign would normally be expected to release. Trump couldn’t even identify who would provide this (very expensive) coverage. Would it be the government or private insurers under a mandate? Yeah, sure, one of those options, he said.
Even so, we can assess how Trump’s proclamation fits in with his prior record as president. The answer: It doesn’t.
An insurance mandate for fertility coverage would effectively be an expansion of essential health benefits. These are the categories of services, set nationwide by Obamacare, that insurance plans are legally mandated to cover, such as prescription drugs, ambulatory services, maternity care and substance-abuse treatment.
But as president, Trump repeatedly tried to weaken or eliminate the very existence of such mandates.
A September 12 Politico piece explores the dynamic; as it notes, Trump's plan would require congressional approval. And even then, it's unclear if Trump-stacked courts would allow it to proceed. One anti-IVF opponent invoked the legal battles of the right against contraception, telling Politico, "You’re going to require faith-based organizations to carry insurance that covers IVF against their conscience?”
Trump’s supposed support of guaranteeing access to IVF is hard to take at face value when his campaign promotes the support of pundits like Daily Wire host Michael Knowles, who has called IVF a “crime,” “evil,” and “immoral,” and suggested that providers be prosecuted.
