Republicans, Stop Letting Democrats Corner You On IVF

To boost their abortion and in vitro fertilization agenda and rhetoric ahead of the rapidly approaching 2024 election, Senate Democrats forced a second vote on an extremist legislative package that would effectively shield the multi-billion dollar fertility industry from oversight and regulation.

The “Right To IVF Act,” introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., lumps several radical Democrat-led assisted reproductive technology (ART) bills into one to ensure the unlimited creation, indefinite freezing, and destruction of millions of embryos.

Included in the self-proclaimed “sweeping” bill are vague language and undefined terms that would force Americans with moral objections to ART to fund the manufacturing of motherless and fatherless children, commercial surrogacy, experimental transhumanist technologies like artificial wombs, “gene editing,” and reproduction without women via in vitro gametogenesis.

Additionally, the package would make a permanent path for taxpayer-funded ART like egg and sperm freezing, IVF, and surrogacy for millions of U.S. servicemembers and veterans. It also incentivizes the promotion of babies by any means necessary above adoption and restorative reproductive treatments that address the root causes of infertility.

The legislation aimed at punishing any entity that attempts to rein in unethical and immoral reproductive technologies already flopped once in June, when it failed to garner the 60 votes required to advance.

Instead of creating a clear and principled response to Democrats’ bad-faith efforts to jam their extremism through the upper chamber, however, Senate Republicans, who claim to be exceptionally pro-life, scrambled to promote their own “iron-clad” pro-IVF bills and statements endorsing “nationwide access to IVF.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who recognized the GOP’s inconsistency on IVF, decided to revive the legislative package for another vote less than two months before Election Day 2024. He and Duckworth openly hoped the vote would corner Republicans into either caving to Democrats’ extremist agenda or floundering to boost the party’s support for ART.

The GOP may have successfully fended off the Democrats’ legislation again during a “show vote” on Tuesday, but Senate and House Republicans alike have repeatedly failed to reconcile the pro-life values they preach with their eager legislative and spoken support for IVF.

Pro-Life Proof

The procedures granted protected by the Democrats’ legislative package no doubt harm both women and babies. The IVF provisions alone guarantee that approximately 93 to 97 percent of babies created in labs won’t survive thanks to premature discard, abandonment in cryogenic freezers, and eugenics-esque genetic testing.

A GOP-led bill, which Sens. Katie Boyd Britt and Ted Cruz demanded and failed to get unanimous consent for on Tuesday, isn’t much better. Instead of preserving and protecting extrauterine babies’ right to life, the legislation threatens states that contemplate banning IVF with a choice between keeping unborn life-destroying practices on the market and keeping Medicaid funding.

Promising an industry that prioritizes profit over people, adults’ selfish desires over children’s natural rights, quick fixes over long-term women’s health solutions, desirable traits above all, forced orphanhood, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, and making human existence transactional protections is not popular. Nor is it pro-life.

Pro-life Republicans have long used “life begins at conception” to fuel their fight against the abortion industry. Contrary to corporate media claims, that purported belief is on par with nearly half of U.S. adults, 46 percent, who say “a fertilized egg is a person with the same rights as a pregnant woman.”

When it comes to IVF, a practice that routinely destroys embryonic life, however, those same GOPers are either silent on the practice or oddly supportive. They’ve let Democrats who are dead-set on linking their abortion and IVF agendas goad them into a partisan pickle.

Both the baby-making and baby-taking industries justify the murder of unborn children as long as those children are not desired. Republicans’ endorsement of such practices only gives Democrats the tools they need to continue deceiving and fearmongering Americans about the realities of their radical abortion and ART aims.

Putting preborn life and families first is good for children, parents, and society, but that can only happen if Republicans stop walking into the traps Democrats are setting for them.

In the context of Tuesday’s vote, that meant not only rejecting Democrats’ sweeping IVF legislation but should have also included a continual refusal to demand a sanitized endorsement of the same eyebrow-raising industry and practice.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.