That’s the subject of my column today.
In the vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz claimed Republicans, in implementing Project 2025, were going to “limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments” like the one he and his wife used to have a child.
Democrats have invested heavily in this argument all year, seeking not only to tie Republicans to an unpopular position but also to make the GOP look “weird.” But the issue is very nearly a complete invention.
A few additional points.
First: As I note in the column, a lot of Democrats (including Kamala Harris) are claiming that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for banning IVF — and as I further note, this is false. The organization “Reproductive Freedom for All,” formerly known as NARAL, purports to show otherwise with pseudo-precision. It claims that page 461 of the Project’s report says that IVF should become “fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.” But if you go to that page, you will see that the report is discussing research that involves abortion or the destruction of human embryos. It advocates funding research that attempts to make the same scientific and therapeutic breakthroughs without involving either of those things. The report says nothing about IVF.
My conclusion is that a lot of progressives have decided they can just say anything they want about Project 2025, and nobody will check. The Daily Beast, for example, just took Reproductive Freedom for All’s word on the matter.
Second: I describe IVF in the U.S. as “lightly regulated” — a characterization that, naturally enough, is disputed by the industry and its public-relations team. Senator Tammy Duckworth, whose expansive bill to expand access to fertility treatments I discuss, has highlighted a Vox article that starts off seeming to take the industry’s side of the argument — but ends up conceding that it’s wrong, observing, for example, that “other countries do have tougher federal rules and penalties governing their fertility sectors.”
Third: I note in passing that the Republican bill to protect IVF could be unconstitutional. It cuts off all federal Medicaid funding for states that prohibit IVF. The Supreme Court heard a relevant case in 2012. The question was whether Congress could pressure states to expand Medicaid by denying all federal Medicaid funds to states that didn’t expand it. In NFIB v. Sebelius, seven justices held that it could not. But as I also note, no state looks at all likely to prohibit IVF. So the law, even if passed, would probably not be triggered — which may also mean that courts would never have an occasion to review it.