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Donald Trump declared himself “the father of IVF” to a crowd of women at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, making bombastic, bizarre claims about his support for the procedure as he tries to curry favor with female voters ahead of the election.
The Republican presidential nominee made the wildly false declaration while fielding a question from someone in the audience, who asked about his position on in vitro fertilization.
“We really are the party for IVF,” Trump said. “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them. So we’re totally in favor.”
To be clear, Trump was never a staunch advocate for IVF before the backlash over the Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February that frozen embryos are considered people. (As I’ve written about before, that ruling was the culmination of a decadeslong push from right-wing anti-abortion activists for the law to reflect their belief that life begins at conception.) Trump even said during the town hall on Tuesday that he didn’t know how the procedure worked until recently. He said he had asked Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama — whom he described as “a young, just a fantastically attractive person” — to “explain” IVF to him on a phone call after the Alabama high court’s February ruling.“I said, ‘Explain ... IVF very quickly,’” Trump said he told Britt. “And within about two minutes, I understood it. I said, ‘No, no, we’re totally in favor of IVF.’”
Amid the fallout over the Alabama ruling, Trump has depicted himself as a staunch supporter of IVF — to the dismay of some hard-core anti-abortion activists within his party — and he has made tall, unrealistic promises about expanding access to the procedure that cannot withstand the current political climate. In August, he told NBC News that he would have the government or insurance companies pay for IVF treatments if elected — a claim that was met with wide skepticism, even by members of his own party, over how that would even happen.
What’s more, Republicans have a long record of opposing fertility care. Trump’s own running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, voted against codifying federal protections for IVF in June and then skipped another Senate vote to protect access to the procedure in October.