Democrats Should Hammer Republicans on IVF

The GOP really doesn't know how to deal with the question of fertility treatments.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

On night two of the Democratic National Convention, viewers watched a video that showcased fertility doctors and families who have had children thanks to IVF. Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth spoke about serving in the US military to preserve American freedoms, and how reproductive choice is an essential one of those freedoms — and one she relied on when she had her daughters via IVF. Vice presidential pick Tim Walz has talked about his family’s fertility struggles, and how he and his wife used fertility medicine to have their children. And Democrats have grown more pointed on the issue, rightly tying it directly to abortion bans and correctly stating that when Republicans including JD Vance had the option of voting to protect IVF, they failed to do so.

IVF and other fertility treatments are incredibly and increasingly common. Millions of babies are born every year because of IVF, and many more thanks to other fertility treatments. While birth rates in the US are generally declining, they have ticked up slightly for women over 35 — the group most likely to rely on IVF to grow their families.

But IVF poses a real problem for “pro-life” conservatives, insofar as it makes the irrationality of their position very obvious and requires them to either reconsider a fundamental premise of their movement, or adopt a profoundly unpopular position that most Americans understand to be bizarro bullshit. This is why IVF is currently roiling the Republican Party, with Republicans seeking office claiming to want to protect it even as they vote against it and support laws that would undermine it, and anti-abortion activists and judges who have no electoral concerns pushing harder to stigmatize and even outlaw it.

The heart of the problem is this: “Life begins at conception” is a claim that has been at the heart of the anti-abortion movement, and has been taken to mean that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a born person and should be treated as such under the law. This isn’t a necessary conclusion — I personally believe that life begins at conception, but I also think that the formation of human life is a long and messy process of turning cells and potential into an actual person. The idea that sperm fertilizes egg and pow you’ve made a baby is… very obviously not how it works. But the anti-abortion movement and the Republican Party have hung their opposition to abortion on this very concept. This is why the eventual goal isn’t a 15-week or 6-week abortion ban, but personhood laws that vest fertilized eggs with personhood rights — that treat those eggs like a person the second they allow a sperm in. This would make IVF untenable.