Republicans swear that they want to protect in vitro fertilization—even as they prepare to tank a Democratic bill to do just that. “I strongly support IVF,” Senator Ted Cruz said Wednesday. “That’s not what [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer] is doing this week when he’s playing political games.”
Cruz, with fellow Republican Senator Katie Britt, put forth their own IVF bill Wednesday, which would have withheld Medicaid funding from states that block the services—but would still allow restrictions on them, as Democrats pointed out as they blocked the legislation. “Calling your bill the IVF Protection Act without doing anything to protect IVF is despicable,” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, who had two children through IVF, said of the GOP-backed legislation. “It is akin to an arsonist selling you fire insurance that doesn’t cover arson.”
Democrats—led by Duckworth and Patty Murray, who registered the objection to the Cruz-Britt “PR stunt”—are putting a more comprehensive IVF protection bill on the floor Thursday: Not only would it prevent states from restricting IVF; it would seek to expand access. “These are real solutions that would help tens of thousands of Americans every year build the families of their dreams,” Duckworth said. But the GOP says Democrats are playing politics—and indicating they’ll almost uniformly oppose the legislation, on the basis that it “treads on religious freedom and protection,” as Britt put it.
“The bottom line is the American people deserve better, Britt said, accusing Democrats of engaging in “scare tactics.”
Though there is plenty of political messaging going on here with these dueling bills, the notion that Democratic warnings about the security of IVF under Republican rule amount only to “scare tactics” is laughable. Conservatives spent decades focused on overturning the abortion protections codified by Roe, and finally succeeded in 2022 with the right-wing Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. The right has sought to build on that victory since then, including with attacks on birth control and medication abortion. Access to the latter was upheld for now by the Supreme Court on Thursday, when it ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s approach to mifepristone. But the threats to reproductive healthcare still loom: Donald Trump, the former president who appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, vowed in virtual remarks Monday to work “side by side” with the Danbury Institute, a radical anti-abortion Christian coalition. “Your work is so important,” Trump told the group, as members gathered in Indianapolis in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which voted Wednesday to oppose IVF.
“It took us 50 years to take down Roe,” Brent Leatherwood, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told Politico. “It may take us a similarly long time frame to get people to a place where they are thinking more deeply about something like this. It’s okay. It takes time. We have to be patient.”
Dobbs, on its own, has been a major political liability for Republicans over the last two years, and they have every incentive to put some political distance between themselves and those in their movement seeking to take their crusade even further. But Democrats should continue to make clear what GOP leadership would mean for reproductive rights in America: “The threat to IVF is not hypothetical,” Murray told reporters Wednesday, citing the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in February to designate embryos as human beings. “Republican efforts to dismiss this vote as fearmongering are simply not going to fly.”
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