Donald Trump’s latest domestic initiative aims to make in vitro fertilization accessible to the American market. That will, fortunately, be an easy win: It was already legalized 44 years ago.
The White House announced two new efforts Thursday, including a partnership with pharmaceutical company EMD Serono that Trump said would reduce the cost of some fertility medications, including Gonal-f, one of the company’s most popular products that treats infertility in men and women.
But Trump also flagged that new federal guidance was on the way to “vastly expand” insurance coverage for fertility care, which, according to him, “was not covered.”
“Effective immediately, for the first time ever, we will make it legal for companies to offer supplemental insurance plans specifically for fertility. That’s never been done before,” Trump said.
That’s just not true: Employer-backed fertility coverage was on the rise, as of last year. A September 2024 report from the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans found that 42 percent of U.S. employers provided fertility and family planning benefits—up from 30 percent the year before.
How the Trump administration intends to enforce the program is unclear. The cost of one IVF cycle can vary wildly across the U.S., falling anywhere between $12,000 to more than $30,000, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. But despite the sacrifice, it’s no guarantee that a cycle will produce a child, no matter the number of eggs someone starts with. Studies have found that roughly two-thirds of patients will have a successful outcome after five or six IVF cycles, posing a tough conundrum for American businesses that intend to comply with the order.
But the high cost of IVF is far from the only reason behind America’s lagging birthrate. Young people cite reasons ranging from economic instability to climate change as their rationale for skipping out on the childrearing chapter. Other pressures, such as the financial burdens of student loan debt and unrealistic housing costs, have also disillusioned Americans in their 20s and 30s from the possibility of creating the next generation.
Trump embraced the hot topic of IVF while on the campaign trail last year, after the Alabama Supreme Court deemed that frozen embryos were human beings, granting them legal rights while practically eradicating IVF and abortion access across the state.
And the MAGA leader is far from being the procedure’s savior. Despite dubbing himself the “Father of IVF,” Trump axed a team of CDC researchers focused on infertility research and assisted reproductive technology in April, paring down federal efforts to better understand the impacts of IVF.
The post Trump Brags About Legalizing Something That Was Already Legal appeared first on New Republic.
