On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris weighed in on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stunning claim earlier this week that he is “the father of IVF.”
Harris was discussing reproductive rights at a rally in Wisconsin when she mentioned Trump’s selection of Supreme Court justices that ultimately helped end federal abortion rights — and the role his party has played in threatening other forms of reproductive healthcare, such as in vitro fertilization.
The Democratic nominee accused Trump of “recognizing the damage he has caused,” before playing a clip at the rally in which Trump voiced his support for IVF.
“Now the man calls himself ‘the father of IVF,’” Harris said with a laugh. “I mean, what does that even mean?”
“By the way, he’s responsible for putting it at risk in the first place,” she continued, adding, “He has no idea what he’s talking about… when it comes to women’s health care in America. ”
Trump made the puzzling statement Thursday during a town hall event in Georgia focused on women’s issues.
“We are truly the party for IVF,” he said at the event, hosted by Fox News’ Harris Faulkner. “We want fertilization, and that is absolutely the case. And the Democrats tried to attack it, and we do more IVF than they do, so we are fully in favor of it,” he said.
Trump has bragged about helping to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion, by appointing three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, many states across the country have passed abortion bans.
Reproductive rights advocates have warned that overturning Roe could impact access to fertility treatments in conservative states, as was the case in Alabama earlier this year. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be legally considered “children,” prompting fertility clinics to halt IVF treatments. The state legislature soon after passed a bill to protect IVF treatments in Alabama.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, told The New York Times in an article published Wednesday that the former president’s “father of IVF” comment was not serious.
It was a “joke that President Trump made in jest when enthusiastically answering a question about IVF,” she said.
