Trump drops IVF promise, preferring to blame women for infertility
By: Amanda Marcotte
religious freedom for thumpers, and a lack of freedom for everyone else, especially women ...
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Instead of treatment, Project 2025 proposes shaming patients for premarital sex
By Amanda Marcotte Senior Writer
The mantra for President Donald Trump's many broken promises in his second term: Predictable, but still outrageous. No more is this truer than his false promises to make in-vitro fertilization (IVF) free to everyone who needs it to conceive. During the 2024 campaign, Trump was relentless in his vows to provide this fertility treatment at no cost to Americans. He often used headline-grabbing creepy language, calling himself the "father of IVF" and the "fertilization president." At one town hall, he declared, "We want fertilization, and it's all the way," ensuring the unfortunate reporters there would rush to the hotel afterward for a shower.
Republicans had taken a polling hit after the Supreme Court, with the help of three Trump appointees, ended the right to abortion in 2022. The president needed to reframe the misogynist Dobbs decision in a "pro-family" light. Happy talk about making babies became the preferred tactic — "because we want more babies, to put it nicely," Trump said at one Michigan event. "We want to produce babies in this country, right?" he asked the crowd at a rally in August.
The promise of free IVF allowed Trump to pretend anti-abortion policies weren't about punishing women, but was simply the result of his overwhelming love for babies and desire to see more of them. Feminists were always skeptical, noting that many abortion opponents also despise IVF, because what motivates them is not "babies" but a desire to strip women of control over their bodies and lives.
The promise of free IVF allowed Trump to pretend anti-abortion policies weren't about punishing women, but was simply the result of his overwhelming love for babies and desire to see more of them. Feminists were always skeptical, noting that many abortion opponents also despise IVF, because what motivates them is not "babies" but a desire to strip women of control over their bodies and lives. Enough people bought the lie, which likely helped push Trump across the line in a photo finish of an election. For instance, the Washington Post profiled a Michigan woman named Ryleigh Cooper, who had reluctantly voted for Trump because she believed that he would make IVF free — only to have the administration cut her forest service job.
This week, Trump officially broke his promise. The White House admitted, after being contacted by reporters from the Washington Post, that there would be no attempts to provide free IVF. Again, that was predictable. It certainly was funny, however, seeing Andrew Schultz, one of the know-nothing "bro" podcasters who helped push their low-information audience into voting for Trump, flipping out over this about-face. Schulz, who went through the IVF process with his wife, seemed genuinely flabbergasted the notoriously dishonest president had lied about this. Sadly, however, Schulz doesn't seem to have drawn the correct conclusion, which is that he should shut up about politics forever.
What was perhaps more telling and more interesting was how the conservative activists guiding Trump's policies reacted: They celebrated. The Christian-right has long opposed IVF, citing phony concerns about embryos destroyed in the process. In reality, as I've written before, they resent IVF for the same reasons they loathe abortion and birth control — conservatives believe women should be enslaved to their biology.
"Anti-abortion officials do not care about making families safer and healthier," Dr. Danielle Gershon, an ob-gyn in Alabama who works with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Salon. "They don't think we deserve access to reproductive health care in any situation."
Of course, Republicans know this position is unpopular, so along with White House officials, they pretended to back an "alternative" they are calling "restorative reproductive medicine." Labeling it a "game-changer," Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation said. "RRM diagnoses and treats the root causes of infertility, like endometriosis, PCOS, low sperm count, blocked fallopian tubes, miscarriages and hormonal imbalances." (The think-tank shepherded Project 2025, which is guiding Trump's policy decisions.)
Unsurprisingly, Waters is being dishonest. As Dr. Gershon told Salon, this is no "different than the care our fertility specialists provide every day." The American Society for Reproductive Medicine notes "RRM is not medical practice but ideology" that creates "a false narrative that standard fertility care skips proper diagnosis or healing." Fertility doctors already try lower-level interventions first and proceed to IVF if other solutions won't work. Pushing women toward RRM only wastes their time, making it less likely they will ever have a baby.
Digging deeper into RRM materials revealed an even more sinister agenda: Blaming women for their infertility through false accusations that it's caused by what the Christian right sees as sexual sin. Or, put more bluntly, it's about shaming women for premarital sex and past use of birth control. The Heritage Foundation's "report" on RRM wastes little time before demonizing the birth control pill as "a daily medication with no therapeutic purpose" and claiming, falsely, that the pill is the reason for infertility. "[F]looding her body with various pharmaceuticals and/or synthetic hormones via pills, injections, or devices," they argue, disrupts the "natural" menstrual cycle they claim women need "for…good health and proper development."
This, it must be underscored and repeated, is flat-out false. The pill's safety and efficacy has been thoroughly researched for decades, and a systematic analysis of studies from 1985 through 2017 found contraception "does not have a negative effect on the ability of women to conceive following termination of use and it doesn't significantly delay fertility." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the "myth" that the pill causes infertility is "often spread by people who do not have any medical education or training."
In material hyping RRM, the anti-birth control agenda is never far from the surface. The International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine offers an endless array of programs peddling falsehoods about contraception, even implying it distorts women's ability to choose a good partner. The "Natural Womanhood," an RRM site heavily promoted by MAGA's "alternative" health people, is replete with disinformation meant to scare women out of using contraception. What actually ties IVF and birth control together is that conservatives believe both make it easier for women to delay marriage and childbirth. That's what really angers them.
All the hype about RRM is tailor-made to appeal to women who have been told by reputable doctors that IVF, which is expensive and invasive, is their only hope. Women might go to RRM providers, hoping for a less expensive, less painful intervention. Instead, they're going to be hit with a wall of blaming and shaming, and told that their supposed sexual sin of the past is causing their current misfortunes. It's a hateful lie, but it's well-designed nonetheless to prey on people who are already feeling low about their infertility.
Restorative Reproductive Medicine won't make it any easier for them to have a baby, but it will make them feel worse about themselves — which was always the point. The anti-abortion movement has never been about "life" or babies. It's about punishing women. RRM is just one of the nastier innovations in woman-hating the right has created in recent years.
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ladies, thumpers are coming after your right to vote next ...
Project 2025 is alive and well.
Jesus! These people will stop at nothing to make women second class citizens.
Birth control pills are not just contraceptives. They are used medically for women with irregular and painful periods. And it's not that hard to get pregnant after going off them. Took me about 2 months to get pregnant.
I thought you said you were raised catholic ... ???
I converted when I got married
to or from?
lol
to
Mr G was raised Catholic. I made a promise to a priest that I would raise the kids Catholic until they were old enough to make their own decisions. Neither of them lasted beyond the 8th grade
I was in the 8th grade when we stopped going to church too. the same church that sponsored my scout troop, so I got to quit going to both. when I was in my 40's, my mom finally admitted to the family that the preacher had hit on her. less than a year later after quitting, a wife swapping sex scandal at that church was the talk of the town, and my 2 former scout troop leaders were also replaced. one for stealing all the troop's money and the other for giving jerk-off lessons on troop camp-outs.
what a waste of time and money ...
there was no money involved just time
wtf? you couldn't just cut the celibate monkey spanker a check and call it good?
Mr G wanted to be married by a priest. He was married by a JP the first time
we got married by the judge that jailed the nuns for blocking the rail line into rocky flats during the vietnam war.
They also can preserve the fertility of women suffering from endometriosis.
I did not know that. Thanks for the info
my daughter suffers from that.
That way the Christian conservatives can be free of any guilt they might have felt for allowing other people to store their fertilized eggs because that poor little soul must be cold, can't allow that!
Thank that invisible wizard in the sky that Christians can rest easy in the knowledge that they are being allowed to force feed their faith down the throats of every American, especially those that don't believe in their God. Now the horrible trauma that rightwing Christian conservative had been suffering by having to mind their own fucking business has been relieved. I mean, we can't have Christian conservatives ever feeling uncomfortable now can we? Maybe we should start crushing the mint leaves for their mint julips so they can sit back and sip their drinks on the veranda while they survey all the minorities that they imagine they rule over. Surely we should thank these cultured, fine Christian conservatives who are so kind and magnanimous as to share their belief in their own superiority with all of the dirty liberal heathens who don't believe in magical souls created at conception who need to learn their place in white rightwing conservative Christian society. /s
I feel sorry for the children of thumpers, especially as they're being transitioned into the sole purpose of human shields ...
It is sad to be born into a fictional war that the thumpers irrationally believe they have to prepare to fight their ideological enemies and those of other competing faiths. Poor kids don't even get to think for themselves before the extremist indoctrination begins and teaches them to hate all the people their parents hate and fear and distrust all the 'others' their parents fear and distrust, especially those who don't believe that a magical invisible soul is created at conception. Good Christian parents have to teach their kids that those 'crazy people' who don't believe in magical invisible souls are really murderers before it's too late! /s
time has run out for maga thumpers to declare which side of the constitution they're on ...
And here I thought some Christians were fine with IVF they just don't think anybody should get an abortion.
Personally, if you can't have a kid, then think about an alternative. Some people weren't meant to be parents.
It was another scism in the SBC. The Convention tried passing a ban on IVF for members and they lost a few. There was enough opposition they couldn't pass the ban though and only managed to pass a resolution - which we know is just a strongly worded message that leadership will look down their noses at the poor couples using it as the last hope for a family.
While the Catholic church opposes IVF, you know better than I at how complicated that whole mess is. Not all Catholics oppose it and many have and continue to turn to IVF when they have nowhere else to turn.
Catholics do a lot of things that goes against the Church's teachings. Our parish had lots of families with only 2 or 3 kids. Pretty sure they weren't using the rhythm method. Most of the people in our parish were military so you can understand why they wanted to limit the size of their families
thumper fucks will be holding funerals for tampons next ...
The problem they have is that no matter how exact you are in that process, there will inevitably be a fertilized egg that has to be discarded, which in their minds, is murder because they believe a magical invisible unique soul is created by their God at the moment of conception. Not any other religions God, their God, thus apparently, they see themselves as the protectors of the unborn but really, they're just ideological psychopaths' intent on forcing their beliefs on others. It's not dissimilar to people from PETA who think 'meat is murder' and block some cattle ranch somewhere trying to stop people from eating cows.
Hopefully, the holier-than-thou anti-abortion conservative Christians who feel that way about fertilized eggs can recognize that, while those folk at PETA are welcome to their opinions, they should get the fuck out of other people's faces who want to eat their hamburgers in peace. These Christian conservatives can choose not to use IVF, they can choose not to use the morning after pill, they can choose not to get an abortion and at the same time they can let every other American citizen make their own choice.
No one is forcing Christians to get abortions just like no one is forcing PETA members to eat meat or forcing Jews to eat bacon, Hindu's to eat cows or Muslims to drink alcohol. Everyone gets to live their faith while, perhaps not always respecting, but at least not infringing on the faiths (or lack thereof) of others.