Trump drops IVF promise, preferring to blame women for infertility

FROM THE ARTICLE

“Anti-abortion officials do not care about making families safer and healthier. They don’t think we deserve access to reproductive health care in any situation.”
PRH Fellow Danielle Gershon

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.