For months, vulnerable House Republicans have been toiling to appeal to women turned off by their support for policies that would limit reproductive rights.
With just nine weeks to go until the election, many appear to have settled on a strategy: airbrushing or at times flatly misrepresenting their records in gauzy, family-focused television ads apparently aimed at those voters.
Some Republicans are claiming that they support protections for in vitro fertilization that they voted against, or that are at odds with legislation they have backed in the past. Others are vowing they would never ban abortion, though they previously said they would support doing so. One states that he cosponsored pro-woman legislation that he actually opposed.
What the advertisements have in common is that they mislead voters about the positions Republicans have taken on reproductive rights and other protections for women — topics that have become politically toxic for the G.O.P. in elections across the country, particularly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
The effort to neutralize their liabilities with female voters has become more urgent for Republicans in Congress given the muddled messages on the topic from former President Donald J. Trump, their party’s candidate for the White House. Mr. Trump often boasts of his role in destroying nationwide abortion access but has recently expressed opposition to Florida’s strict abortion ban and portrayed himself as a champion of I.V.F.
In the first television ad of her campaign, Representative Michelle Steel, a vulnerable Republican from Orange County, California, sits in front of a fireplace as she tells her own story of struggling to start a family and turning to in vitro fertilization to get pregnant with both of her daughters. “For us, it was a miracle,” she says. “I have always supported women’s access to I.V.F. and will fight to defend it.”
Ms. Steel adds: “For some, protecting women is a campaign issue. For me, there’s nothing more important.”
Ms. Steel, however, twice cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, a bill that would grant legal personhood to fertilized eggs, effectively criminalizing abortions and potentially aspects of I.V.F. treatments, which typically involve the destruction of embryos.
Ms. Steel removed her name from the legislation immediately after winning her Republican primary in March, claiming that her support for it “could create confusion about my support for the blessings of having children through I.V.F.” She now says she believes that “federal should not ban anything,” as she put it in an interview this week, and that abortion rights should be left to the states.
In the interview, Ms. Steel said that her flip-flopping on the bill was the result of “confusion” about whether “I.V.F. was in or not, or they were going to take it out.” The three-page-long bill clearly does not contain exceptions for in vitro fertilization or anything else, flatly stating that its purpose is “to implement equal protection for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.” It goes on to define a human as “each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”
Across the country in New York, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican, says in a new ad: “I will always support and defend women. I would never vote for a national abortion ban — ever.”
He has not always been so definitive on the matter. In 2022, Mr. D’Esposito was pressed by the news website Semafor about whether he would vote for a 15-week ban. “Probably,” he said, then tried to take it back after a spokeswoman asked that he not be quoted saying so. “I rescind what I say when I say ‘probably,’” he said then.
Republicans in California and New York are at the center of the fight to control the House of Representatives next year. And they are trying to soften their stances on reproductive rights for good reason. About 70 percent of Americans think access to I.V.F. is a good thing, according to a Pew Research survey. And a record 69 percent of voters think abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Ms. Steel’s district, which was previously rated as “lean Republican” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, on Friday was moved to a “toss up.” Mr. D’Esposito’s district is also ranked as a toss up.
In the interview, Ms. Steel suggested that she had not wanted to reveal her personal fertility experience in a campaign ad, but felt compelled to.
“When you are a public person you have to reveal everything; that’s not really fair,” Ms. Steel said. “But you know what, that’s where I’m at.”
Some Senate Republicans have found themselves in a similarly tricky spot.
In Florida, where a six-week abortion ban took effect in May and an abortion rights amendment is set to appear on the ballot in November, Senator Rick Scott, an unpopular Republican, is claiming he supports I.V.F. in an ad.
“Our youngest daughter is receiving I.V.F. treatments right now, hoping to expand her family,” he says, before jumping in a pool fully clothed in order to get a laugh out of his grandchildren. “She and I both agree I.V.F. must be protected.”
The ad hit the Florida airwaves a day after he voted against the Right to I.V.F. Act, legislation proposed by Democrats that would guarantee federal protections and insurance coverage for the procedure. Mr. Scott defended the vote, saying he had opposed it because the bill infringed on religious freedom protections, implying that it could force people who do not believe in I.V.F. treatments to provide them. But Democrats have noted that the legislation does not force anyone to provide such treatments.
His campaign said he supports a Republican bill entitled the I.V.F. Protection Act, even though he is not a cosponsor of that measure. The bill, which has drawn the ire of anti-abortion groups, would deny Medicaid funding to states that ban I.V.F. But activists for reproductive rights note that it would do nothing to protect access if states imposed severe restrictions, nor would it protect I.V.F. providers from prosecution or civil liability under state laws that hold that a fetus is a person.
It’s not unusual for lawmakers in either party to tweak or outright shift positions while running for re-election. But the television spots on women’s issues are notable for how sharply Republican lawmakers are diverging from their past positions on a matter that has defined their party for years.
The spots are just the latest example of a monthslong effort by Republican lawmakers to backtrack on the issue. In Iowa, Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, another vulnerable Republican, said this week that she had backed the Life at Conception Act only because she had assumed she could make changes to it down the line.
“It’s not unusual for people to sign on to a bill so they can get it out and to debate, where you can do amendments and you can fine tune,” Ms. Miller-Meeks said in an interview.
Democrats are spending the closing weeks of the campaign season calling attention to the inconsistencies.
“House Republicans will stop at nothing — including restricting I.V.F. access and lying to their own voters about it — to reach their ultimate goal: banning abortion and gutting reproductive rights nationwide,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Some vulnerable Republicans are reaching beyond issues of reproductive rights in their efforts to portray themselves as champions of women’s rights, even when their records do not quite match up with the claim.
Representative Mike Garcia, a Republican whose California district sits just north of Los Angeles, released a new ad featuring a woman who tells voters: “Mike Garcia cosponsored the Violence Against Women Act to protect us against domestic violence. That’s why we need Mike Garcia in Congress.”
But Mr. Garcia did not co-sponsor the reauthorization of the landmark legislation that President Biden signed into law in 2022 as part of a sprawling spending package.
In fact, he joined Republicans in opposing it.
They opposed the bill because of new provisions that expanded protections for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and required the federal government to notify state and local law enforcement authorities when a convicted domestic abuser lies on a background check in an illegal attempt to buy a gun.
Mr. Garcia was a co-sponsor of a Republican-led alternative bill, which sought to renew the Violence Against Women’s act for one year, without the new provisions. That measure never moved forward and was never even brought up for a vote.
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