Since Donald Trump took office, he’s issued executive orders on everything from so-called government waste to doing away with paper straws. But the Trump IVF executive order that he released on February 18 stood out, for both its topic and its vaguery.
Titled “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization,” it states that the administration recognizes and wants to support “family formation,” but notes that as many as one in seven couples are unable to conceive without assistance. In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is one of the ways these families can have a child, but the process can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 out of pocket, making it prohibitively expensive for many.
The Trump administration, the order states, wants to change that by ensuring “reliable access to IVF treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.”
Unlike previous executive orders, which made drastic moves from creating a whole new government office (DOGE) or shutting down US aid to foreign nations (and leaving its workers across the world in limbo), the IVF order is much less prescriptive. The action item is passive in comparison to its predecessors, with Trump simply saying that he wants the issue of IVF access and affordability to be studied.
“Within 90 days of the date of this order, the assistant to the president for domestic policy shall submit to the president a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment,” it states.
Out of context, Trump’s executive order on IVF isn’t overly declarative and is rather benign. But it’s impossible to view it in a vacuum. Trump is issuing this order amid a flurry of moves by his own party on both the federal and state level to severely restrict reproductive rights. Given this context, experts say the order feels like a red herring, a move to distract Americans, who overwhelmingly support abortion rights, from understanding how at risk those rights really are under his administration.
“I think it’s strategic,” Erin Matson, the cofounder and CEO of the advocacy group Reproaction, tells me. “I’m very worried by what I’m seeing. I think this is a kind of a cookie he’s throwing to the public to try to deflect and distract.”
She adds: “It’s like your toothless grandpa saying he’s going to, like, make candy corn and eat it with you. It’s not happening.”
This disconnect is most apparent when looking at how hardline antiabortion lawmakers have acted since Trump took office in January. They have proposed a flurry of bills, most notably one which would ban abortion by declaring a fetus a person at the moment of conception (a doctrine known as fetal personhood), which would also effectively ban IVF.
“I think it’s strategic. I’m very worried by what I’m seeing. I think this is a kind of a cookie he’s throwing to the public to try to deflect and distract.”
This issue first came to a head last year, when antiabortion lawmakers in Alabama successfully passed a law declaring that embryos—including frozen ones at IVF clinics—were children. This caused all fertility clinics in the state to pause treatments, because embryos created for IVF are regularly tested and destroyed. If these cells were now legally children, clinics couldn’t effectively do the procedure without risking, essentially, murder. After a nationwide uproar, legislators in the state effectively created a loophole, writing a law that allowed for embryo damage or destruction for IVF specifically.
After the Alabama issue was resolved, Trump vowed during his campaign to protect IVF nationwide. In response to a question from a voter at a town hall in October, who said she was concerned about the further loss of reproductive rights after the end of Roe v. Wade in 2022, he called himself “the father of IVF” and said he “strongly supported” access to it.
Although experts say the House fetal personhood bill is unlikely to pass, this hypocrisy between the legislative and executive branches, both controlled by the same party, can’t be ignored. Simply, there’s no way to effectively do both at once.
“True reproductive freedom means not just protecting access to IVF but ensuring that every individual has the ability to make decisions about their bodies, their health, and their families—no matter where they live, who they are, or their economic background,” Christina Chang, executive director of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, says.
A fetal personhood bill is not the only threat. Most abortion rights activists I’ve spoken with are most concerned about the GOP’s attempt to restrict or ban medication abortion via the pills mifepristone and misoprostol. Republican lawmakers have proposed a bill that would ban medication abortion, but other tactics could be to attempt to pull the FDA’s approval of the pills or restrict the sending of pills by mail to states where abortion is banned (last month, a New York doctor was charged criminally in Louisiana for doing just that).
“True reproductive freedom means not just protecting access to IVF but ensuring that every individual has the ability to make decisions about their bodies, their health, and their families—no matter where they live, who they are, or their economic background.”
All of this to say, how are we supposed to interpret this executive order? After all, most fertility specialists and advocates would welcome IVF becoming less expensive and more accessible to all, and many praised the possibility of the government doing so.
“As a pro-life rabbi and father of nine children, I can confidently tell religious conservatives that there is nothing more pro-life than IVF,” Rabbi Moshe Margaretten, founder and president of the advocacy group Americans for IVF, tells me. “On behalf of would-be parents who need financial support to build their families, I welcome this announcement but note that the HOPE Act is our best guarantee.”
Margaretten is referring to a bipartisan bill introduced in the House in 2024, which would expand access to IVF through private insurance coverage. Another pro-IVF bill, the Right to IVF Act, which was heavily backed by Democratic Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, was blocked by Senate Republicans last year.
For Duckworth, Trump’s IVF executive order is a lot of smoke and mirrors. She says that we shouldn’t be “fooled” by the move, which she called “lip service by a known liar.”
“Donald Trump’s executive order does nothing to expand access to IVF,” she says in a statement. “In fact, he’s the reason IVF is at risk in the first place. But if he is actually serious about taking real action to accomplish his own campaign promise to make IVF free for everyone, there’s a simple way he can prove it: He can call on Senate Republicans to immediately back my Right to IVF Act that would require insurance plans to cover IVF.”
And reproductive rights organizations are similarly wary.
“As a parent who has gratefully turned to IVF to grow our family, and as someone who spends every day surrounded by stories of people denied essential reproductive health care, I hope this administration will take the time time to listen to the experiences of patients and health care providers across our country who can speak to the very real threat abortion bans pose to fertility care and maternal health,” Lauren Peterson, the cofounder of Abortion in America, tells me.
She put it simply: “You cannot meaningfully expand access to IVF while attacking access to abortion.”
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