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It was just last week when the White House held an event to commemorate Women’s History Month, which included some curious remarks from Donald Trump.
“We’re gonna have tremendous, tremendous goodies in the bag for women, too,” the president said, referring to his administration’s agenda. “The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president, and that’s OK, that’s not bad. I’ve been called much worse. Actually, I like it. I like it, right? Thank you.”
The Republican didn’t fully explain what he was trying to say, but in context, I think he was referring to in vitro fertilization, an expensive treatment that Trump, during the 2024 campaign, said he would make free to Americans during his second term. In fact, in mid-October, the Republican declared that he considered himself “the father of IVF,” which was every bit as ridiculous as it seemed.
Five months later, Trump nevertheless kept this going, predicting that he’d be “known as the fertilization president.”
That seems unlikely. For one thing, the president signed an executive order on IVF that did effectively nothing to make the treatments more affordable, campaign promises notwithstanding.
For another, the Trump administration just gutted its own IVF team. NBC News reported:
A team that tracked how well in vitro fertilization worked across the U.S. was abruptly cut Tuesday as part of the sweeping layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services. The elimination of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance team — a group of six epidemiologists, data analysts and researchers — shocked public health experts and IVF advocates.
The network spoke to one unnamed CDC employee who worked on the team that was terminated, who said the group was preparing to publish new data on the success rates of IVF across states. That work is now on indefinite hold.
“It’s surprising to me,” the worker said. “President Trump said he was the fertility president. How does cutting this program support that?”
It doesn’t. Trump seems to realize that IVF enjoys broad public support, so he positioned himself with the American mainstream before Election Day. But now that he and his administration are engaged in policymaking, the president is saying one thing while doing the opposite.
As for those who might’ve voted for Trump because they believed his rhetoric about IVF, I have some very bad news.