The pivot seems clear. The post-Roe Republican Party is pushing anti-abortion activists aside. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for innovative abortion bans, has been rejected by Donald Trump. And the new party platform even promises to expand access to in vitro fertilization.
But as Trump backs away from the anti-abortion revolution his own administration ushered in, a powerful battalion of conservative Christians has pressed on, quietly laying the groundwork in recent months for their fight to restrict access not just to abortion, but to IVF as well.
They are planting seeds for their ultimate goal of ending abortion from conception, both within the Republican Party and outside of it. They face an uphill political battle, as their positions are largely unpopular and do not reflect majority opinion, particularly on IVF.
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Their challenge, they argue, spans generations, not just a single political cycle. And their approach — including policing regulatory language, state party platforms and the definition of when life begins — reflects an incremental strategy similar to the one activists used for decades to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade.
“I expect there will be steps backward as well, along with what we’re working toward, which is long strides forward,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, who recently mobilized evangelicals against IVF.
The fall of Roe itself was far from linear, he noted. “It was almost half a century of work, half a century of frustration, half a century of setbacks and progress,” Mohler said. “It’s going to be an uphill climb, but that’s what we’re called to do.”
Some of this groundwork is easy to see. Mohler helped lead a successful campaign in June to get the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, to vote against the use of IVF for the first time, even though the procedure is wildly popular among evangelical families. The vote served to refocus the abortion conversation in evangelical churches on fertility treatments, and to give ardent opponents of IVF a new metric to prove to Republican politicians that their core constituents could support anti-IVF efforts.
Other changes are happening more quietly. This year, several state Republican parties added new anti-abortion language to their own platforms, even as the national party moved in the opposite direction. Idaho’s Republican Party added a five-word phrase — “the destruction of human embryos” — to a list of things it opposes, signaling a stance against common IVF procedures. A similar phrase already existed in North Carolina’s platform.
Republicans in Texas added a sentence defining abortion as “murder,” creating an argument for potential prosecutions of doctors who perform the procedure and women who undergo it. South Carolina added language targeting the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a drug commonly used in pregnancy terminations, including miscarriages: “We oppose the FDA and its efforts to make ‘chemical abortions’ easily available and accessible.”
The national Republican platform removed a reference to “children before birth.” But the movement to promote “fetal personhood” — granting embryos rights as persons through a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment — continues.
Students for Life of America, a prominent anti-abortion group, wants more regulation of IVF. It is working to create a legal basis for fetal personhood in upcoming abortion-related bills in Congress and the states. The strategy follows a similar one, carefully planned by activists, that led to the overturning of Roe by Mississippi’s abortion ban.
Roe had blocked efforts to advance an anti-abortion argument about the 14th Amendment, said Kristi Hamrick, a veteran strategist for the group. “But Roe is gone and we’re in a new legal environment, so it makes sense that that becomes part of our conversation,” she said.
There is also a new anti-abortion “minority report” released by a coalition of 19 Republican delegates to the convention, highlighting their dissatisfaction with the party platform.
The delegates, led by Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, emphasized their goals to “end the exploitation of embryonic human beings, and above all, recognize the application of the protections of the 14th Amendment to our developing descendants.”
Though their positions weren’t on the main stage at the convention, they have an ideological ally in Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who has said he is “100 percent pro-life.” Even as Vance, the vice presidential nominee, defends Trump’s reversed positions, he has used the safety language common to anti-abortion activists when discussing Trump’s positions on mifepristone, a widely available drug used in medical abortions.
“He just wants to make sure that drugs are safe and effective before they go on the market, and of course that doctors are monitoring this stuff properly so people don’t get hurt,” Vance said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
The American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs, one of the anti-abortion groups that sued the Food and Drug Administration to restrict the distribution of mifepristone, currently has no position on IVF but is working to develop new guidelines for the procedure. Although its case was recently dismissed by the Supreme Court, the group launched a lobbying arm in June to prepare for future advocacy campaigns.
Dr. Christina Francis, who heads the association, said the group was planning a report that would not take a position against IVF. Instead, it would identify “the gaps in our ethics around IVF,” she said, and propose a set of “guardrails.” That rhetoric — “ethics” and “guardrails” — reflects a similar strategy that was ultimately used to achieve the 2003 federal law that banned abortion procedures involving dilation and extraction.
According to Francis, there are restrictions on IVF in Germany. She suggested that IVF procedures would ideally create one embryo, or possibly two in older women.
“You’re certainly going to have the least amount of ethical dilemmas if you’re doing fresh transfers,” without freezing embryos, she said. “Just having this discussion as a country, and as a profession frankly in medicine, is a good discussion to have.”
Kristen Ullman, president of the Eagle Forum, which was founded by social conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly, said her movement could “absolutely” move forward on regulating IVF, despite the “disappointment” of the Republican position.
“The platform, it’s not legislation,” she said. And while the new Republican platform is much shorter with less detail on abortion-related policy priorities, it has an advantage, she added: “You can be intentionally vague.”
In the past, rejection by the Republican Party has prompted abortion opponents to redouble their efforts and find new ways to gain power. After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, party leaders explicitly blamed anti-abortion activists, saying their positions were out of step with a liberalizing America. But activists resisted, using an outsider—Trump—to bolster their power, ensconced within his administration and his revamped Republican Party.
The anti-abortion coalition knows that its ambitions will almost certainly become reality again if Trump is granted another term, with administration officials pursuing the same goals and placed in powerful positions.
For years before Roe was overturned, activists pushed fringe policies, using reporting requirements and data collection to build a foundation for their ultimate goals. Today, anti-abortion activists see ways to use these officials to undermine access to the procedure and potentially fertility treatments through new regulations from federal agencies including the FDA, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
“What happens under a Trump administration depends entirely on the people in that administration,” Ullman said.
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