Donald Trump declared himself “the father of IVF” to a crowd of women at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, making bombastic, outlandish claims about his support for the procedure as he tries to curry favor with female voters ahead of the election.
The Republican presidential candidate made the completely false statement while answering a question from an audience member who asked about his position on in vitro fertilization.
“We are truly the party for IVF,” Trump said. “We want conception, and it is totally, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we are even more into IVF than they are. So we are fully in favor of it.”
To be clear, Trump was never a staunch advocate for IVF before the reaction to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling in February that frozen embryos are considered human. (As I’ve written before, that statement was the culmination of a decades-long push by right-wing anti-abortion activists to express the law’s belief that life begins at conception.) Trump even said during Tuesday’s town hall that he until recently did not know how the procedure worked. He said he asked Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama — whom he described as “a young, just a wonderfully attractive person” — to explain IVF to him during a phone call after the Supreme Court ruling in February.
“I said, ‘Explain… IVF real quick,’” Trump told Britt. “And within about two minutes I understood. I said, ‘No, no, we are completely in favor of IVF.’
Amid the fallout from the Alabama ruling, Trump has portrayed himself as a staunch supporter of IVF — much to the dismay of some hardcore anti-abortion activists within his party — and made big, unrealistic promises about expanding access to the procedure it cannot withstand the current political climate. In August, he told NBC News that he would make the government or insurance companies pay for IVF treatments if he were elected — a claim that was met with deep skepticism, even from members of his own party, about how that would even happen.
Moreover, Republicans have a long track record of opposing fertility care. Trump’s own running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, voted against codifying federal protections for IVF in June and then skipped another Senate vote in October to protect access to the procedure.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
