The Corner

Politics & Policy

The 2024 Campaign Brings Dueling Idiocies on IVF

Republican presidential nominee and former president Donald Trump participates in a town hall presented by Spanish-language network Univision, in Doral, Fla., October 16, 2024. (Marco Bello/Reuters)

No, Donald Trump is not “the father of IVF,” as he just claimed. No, IVF is not “under threat across the country because Trump ended Roe v. Wade,” and no, it is not true that “his Project 2025 plan could effectively ban IVF altogether,” as the Harris campaign claimed in response.

As noted here: IVF is legal in every state and is not on the verge of being prohibited anywhere in the U.S.; opposition to its legality is politically marginal; in the one state where fertility clinics complained that a court decision made it legally perilous, Alabama, the legislature swiftly acted to protect it; Project 2025, which Trump has repudiated several times, does not mention IVF.

The courts, by the way, never read Roe v. Wade to protect IVF from prohibition and Dobbs did nothing to change the procedure’s legal status. States had the power to regulate or even ban IVF under Roe and have it now; they have for the most part not sought to exercise that power. Both the opinion and the dissent in the Alabama case agreed that the wrongful-death law at issue covered unborn children in the womb even when Roe was in effect.

Coverage of this issue — see the first sentence of this CNN article, for example — remains abysmal.

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