Report: Anti-Abortion Leaders Helped Tank Trump's Promise of Free IVF

[In It to Win It]

Anti-abortion advocates haven’t just played key roles in rolling back abortion rights in recent years. They also helped tank President Donald Trump’s campaign-trail promise to make in vitro fertilization free.

That’s according to a new report published Saturday in Politico, which reveals that anti-abortion activists—some of whom are opposed to IVF because it involves discarding unused embryos—spent more than a year lobbying the Trump campaign, and then his administration, to ensure that officials did not subsidize or mandate coverage of the procedure. They got their wish earlier this month, when the president announced a far more limited initiative: a cost-cutting agreement with a leading fertility medication manufacturer to slash prices on a drug involved in the IVF process. Trump also announced the creation of a new fertility insurance benefit that employers could voluntarily offer to employees.

“There were letters and meetings and calls—a lot of activity,” Kristi Hamrick, vice president for media and policy at the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told Politico. “We told [the administration] that it would be an absolute violation of people’s conscience rights to force taxpayers to subsidize IVF, which has the business model that destroys more life than is ever born.”

Anti-abortion advocates had long been vocal about their opposition to Trump’s promises to promote IVF. After his February executive order—which claimed to expand access to the procedure but merely required an official to gather ideas on how to do so, as I reported at the time—several leading abortion opponents decried the move. But the Politico story indicates that anti-abortion advocates’ involvement in scaling back the administration’s moves on IVF was greater than previously known.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/anti-abortion-leaders-trump-ivf-politico/

[Hekate]

1. Anyone who's been paying attention to anti-abortion evolution over the years has experienced being told...

…that every form of contraception they ever used is in the pea-brains of “pro-lifers” an abortifacient. Imagine my surprise! I finally realized that the D&C my mother was given to help her recover from an incomplete miscarriage was also being redefined as an abortion. I’m glad Mom’s not alive to have to read that garbage: born in 1924 and raised Catholic, the idea of personally having an abortion was anathema to her — but like most women, she wasn’t stupid, either.

Refusing to use taxpayer dollars for IVF or research just tracks right along with the “personhood” laws those people got passed. Zygotes uber alles — women not so much. Step by step they are removing women’s agency in obtaining the full range of necessary health care.

[lark]

2. Ha, I knew it was bullshit and would never happen the second he said it.

Knew he'd listen to the Proect 2025'ers who are crazily anti-women.