Republicans Just Blocked a Vote on an IVF Bill — Again – Mother Jones

Trump said he was a ‘leader’ on IVF. His party suggests otherwise.Photo Image Press/ZUMA

Trump has told many There were several things that happened in last week’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. One of them, it seems increasingly clear, was the stumbling claim — intended to bolster his support for in vitro fertilization, or IVF — that he is “a leader in fertility.”

On Tuesday, Republican senators provided further evidence of Trump’s lies, voting:Again— to block a bill that would protect access to IVF nationwide. Introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), who said she used IVF to give birth to her two daughters, the bill would prevent states from enacting restrictions on fertility treatments.

Trump has done more to hinder access to IVF than to protect it. In fact, he is the reason the practice is even being discussed: he appointed three of the five conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned the decision. Roe deer In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationjeopardizing access to IVF in states like Alabama. (The state Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos, often discarded in the IVF process, could be considered children under state law.)

Major reproductive rights and fertility groups called on senators to support the bill, but Republicans made it clear they weren’t interested. While the bill needed 60 votes to pass, it failed to pass, with only Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) joining Democrats in their affirmative votes. It was the second time Republicans had sabotaged the bill, having previously blocked it from passage in June. (That same month, they also blocked a bill to protect contraception at the federal level.)

“The reality is that it was (Trump) who created the risk of IVF,” Duckworth said on the Senate floor after the vote. “The Dobbs decision is what led us to the nightmare we have today, by taking away the power to decide how and when to start a family, and giving it to state politicians across the country.”

Duckworth criticizes Trump over IVF, saying “he’s the reason IVF is in danger,” before imploring her fellow Republicans: “Today’s vote is your chance to put your money where your mouth is.” pic.twitter.com/8i7fVmRaa8

— POLITICO (@politico) September 17, 2024

On a call with reporters Tuesday morning, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said that if Trump really wanted to protect IVF, he would have talked to Republican senators about how to proceed. “Where is he now?” she asked. “Where is he in the middle of all this?” (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Republicans have called the measure a show-stopper ballot measure. Republican lawmakers have proposed counterproposals to enshrine IVF. In May, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Katie Britt (R-Alabama) introduced a bill that would revoke Medicaid funding from states that ban IVF, but would also not require organizations to offer IVF and would allow states to regulate “health and safety standards” related to it.

Leading reproductive rights and fertility groups have called the bill — just three pages long, compared to Duckworth’s 64-page legislation — a “bogus” bill, saying it would not go far enough in protecting fertility care from restrictive state policies, and have urged senators to support Duckworth’s bill instead.

A spokesman for Trump’s running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, who was not in Washington for Tuesday’s vote, accused Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of playing “political games.” Vance and Trump “fully support guaranteed access to IVF for every American family,” the spokesman said. (Trump has also claimed that under his watch, the government or insurance companies would pay for it, a move that has reportedly baffled even his advisers.)

On the Senate floor Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray (Washington) said Cruz’s bill “does nothing to meaningfully protect IVF from the greatest threat from anti-abortion lawmakers and extremists.” She also highlighted the far more insidious threat that blocking those protections poses: It opens a potential path for Republicans to move closer to enshrining “fetal personhood” in law.

As I have written, fetal personhood would ban abortion nationwide by granting full citizenship and rights to fetuses. Anti-abortion leaders have admitted that this is their goal. (As Murray has pointed out, Cruz signaled support for a fetal personhood amendment to the Constitution during his 2016 campaign; Vance has also signaled support for fetal personhood and a federal abortion ban in the past, as I have discussed.)

Cruz’s bill, Murray said, “says nothing about fetal personhood, which is the biggest threat to IVF,” adding that it “also says nothing about whether states can require that an embryo be treated the same as a living person, or whether parents should be allowed to let clinics dispose of unused embryos, which is a necessary and routine part of the IVF process.”

“This uncertainty is at the heart of the bans that Republicans have brought about,” she added.

Another way to look at it is that uncertainty may be the problem. Republicans have tried desperately to obscure their real goals for a second Trump term: They spelled out their plans—to ban medication abortion nationwide and eliminate the Department of Education, among other things—in the 900-page Project 2025 playbook, and then Trump tried to distance himself from them, despite Trump and Vance’s proven ties to the initiative. The GOP has tried to push the narrative that they have “softened” the abortion narrative, even though the reality proves otherwise.

And now, despite Cruz’s efforts to paint Democrats as anti-IVF and anti-family, it was the Republican Party that killed that vote — just as it was the Republican Party that killed the expanded child tax credit.

Perhaps Vance should remember that the next time he tries to claim that this country makes it too difficult to start a family.