The mantra for President Donald Trump‘s many broken promises in his second term: Predictable, but still outrageous. No more is this truer than his false promises to make in-vitro fertilization (IVF) free to everyone who needs it to conceive. During the 2024 campaign, Trump was relentless in his vows to provide this fertility treatment at no cost to Americans. He often used headline-grabbing creepy language, calling himself the “father of IVF” and the “fertilization president.” At one town hall, he declared, “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way,” ensuring the unfortunate reporters there would rush to the hotel afterward for a shower.
Republicans had taken a polling hit after the Supreme Court, with the help of three Trump appointees, ended the right to abortion in 2022. The president needed to reframe the misogynist Dobbs decision in a “pro-family” light. Happy talk about making babies became the preferred tactic — “because we want more babies, to put it nicely,” Trump said at one Michigan event. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?” he asked the crowd at a rally in August.
The promise of free IVF allowed Trump to pretend anti-abortion policies weren’t about punishing women, but was simply the result of his overwhelming love for babies and desire to see more of them. Feminists were always skeptical, noting that many abortion opponents also despise IVF, because what motivates them is not “babies” but a desire to strip women of control over their bodies and lives.
The promise of free IVF allowed Trump to pretend anti-abortion policies weren’t about punishing women, but was simply the result of his overwhelming love for babies and desire to see more of them. Feminists were always skeptical, noting that many abortion opponents also despise IVF, because what motivates them is not “babies” but a desire to strip women of control over their bodies and lives. Enough people bought the lie, which likely helped push Trump across the line in a photo finish of an election. For instance, the Washington Post profiled a Michigan woman named Ryleigh Cooper, who had reluctantly voted for Trump because she believed that he would make IVF free — only to have the administration cut her forest service job.
This week, Trump officially broke his promise. The White House admitted, after being contacted by reporters from the Washington Post, that there would be no attempts to provide free IVF. Again, that was predictable. It certainly was funny, however, seeing Andrew Schultz, one of the know-nothing “bro” podcasters who helped push their low-information audience into voting for Trump, flipping out over this about-face. Schulz, who went through the IVF process with his wife, seemed genuinely flabbergasted the notoriously dishonest president had lied about this. Sadly, however, Schulz doesn’t seem to have drawn the correct conclusion, which is that he should shut up about politics forever.
What was perhaps more telling and more interesting was how the conservative activists guiding Trump’s policies reacted: They celebrated. The Christian-right has long opposed IVF, citing phony concerns about embryos destroyed in the process. In reality, as I’ve written before, they resent IVF for the same reasons they loathe abortion and birth control — conservatives believe women should be enslaved to their biology.
“Anti-abortion officials do not care about making families safer and healthier,” Dr. Danielle Gershon, an ob-gyn in Alabama who works with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Salon. “They don’t think we deserve access to reproductive health care in any situation.”
Of course, Republicans know this position is unpopular, so along with White House officials, they pretended to back an “alternative” they are calling “restorative reproductive medicine.” Labeling it a “game-changer,” Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation said. “RRM diagnoses and treats the root causes of infertility, like endometriosis, PCOS, low sperm count, blocked fallopian tubes, miscarriages and hormonal imbalances.” (The think-tank shepherded Project 2025, which is guiding Trump’s policy decisions.)
Unsurprisingly, Waters is being dishonest. As Dr. Gershon told Salon, this is no “different than the care our fertility specialists provide every day.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine notes “RRM is not medical practice but ideology” that creates “a false narrative that standard fertility care skips proper diagnosis or healing.” Fertility doctors already try lower-level interventions first and proceed to IVF if other solutions won’t work. Pushing women toward RRM only wastes their time, making it less likely they will ever have a baby.
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Digging deeper into RRM materials revealed an even more sinister agenda: Blaming women for their infertility through false accusations that it’s caused by what the Christian right sees as sexual sin. Or, put more bluntly, it’s about shaming women for premarital sex and past use of birth control. The Heritage Foundation’s “report” on RRM wastes little time before demonizing the birth control pill as “a daily medication with no therapeutic purpose” and claiming, falsely, that the pill is the reason for infertility. “[F]looding her body with various pharmaceuticals and/or synthetic hormones via pills, injections, or devices,” they argue, disrupts the “natural” menstrual cycle they claim women need “for…good health and proper development.”
This, it must be underscored and repeated, is flat-out false. The pill’s safety and efficacy has been thoroughly researched for decades, and a systematic analysis of studies from 1985 through 2017 found contraception “does not have a negative effect on the ability of women to conceive following termination of use and it doesn’t significantly delay fertility.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the “myth” that the pill causes infertility is “often spread by people who do not have any medical education or training.”
In material hyping RRM, the anti-birth control agenda is never far from the surface. The International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine offers an endless array of programs peddling falsehoods about contraception, even implying it distorts women’s ability to choose a good partner. The “Natural Womanhood,” an RRM site heavily promoted by MAGA’s “alternative” health people, is replete with disinformation meant to scare women out of using contraception. What actually ties IVF and birth control together is that conservatives believe both make it easier for women to delay marriage and childbirth. That’s what really angers them.
All the hype about RRM is tailor-made to appeal to women who have been told by reputable doctors that IVF, which is expensive and invasive, is their only hope. Women might go to RRM providers, hoping for a less expensive, less painful intervention. Instead, they’re going to be hit with a wall of blaming and shaming, and told that their supposed sexual sin of the past is causing their current misfortunes. It’s a hateful lie, but it’s well-designed nonetheless to prey on people who are already feeling low about their infertility.
Restorative Reproductive Medicine won’t make it any easier for them to have a baby, but it will make them feel worse about themselves — which was always the point. The anti-abortion movement has never been about “life” or babies. It’s about punishing women. RRM is just one of the nastier innovations in woman-hating the right has created in recent years.
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