Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Democrats have been actively seeking to elevate abortion as a central voting issue to drive their base to the polls. One strategy has been to merge abortion with the debate over in vitro fertilization (IVF), effectively adopting it as part of their broader 2024 election strategy by pushing claims that Republicans are attempting to ban IVF.
To this effort, Senate Democrats, spearheaded by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), pushed for a second vote on the so-called "Right to IVF Act" this week. "If Donald Trump and Republicans want to protect people's right to access IVF, they can vote yes on it," Duckworth told CBS News before the vote. "He's shown that it only takes one sentence from him, and the Republican Party will fall in line behind him."
The bill failed to advance, and the media promptly pushed the expected narrative. "Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would protect access to IVF on Tuesday, in a vote that Democrats held to draw attention to the issue after former President Donald Trump's recent statements supporting the fertility treatments," CBS reported.
"For the second time in four months, Senate Democrats forced a vote on the Right To IVF Act, only to be blocked by Republicans who called it unnecessary and politically motivated as Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to make access to in vitro fertilization a 2024 campaign issue," read the lede at NBC News. The headline over at CNN read, "Senate GOP blocks IVF bill again as Democrats spotlight issue ahead of elections."
Naturally, these stories and headlines aren't telling the whole story. This is a common election-year tactic that can be surprisingly effective if the media is on your side. Of course, the devil is always in the details, because the "Right to IVF Act," is far more than what its name implies — as is the case with most legislation.
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"The 'Right To IVF Act,' introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., lumps several radical Democrat-led assisted reproductive technology (ART) bills into one to ensure the unlimited creation, indefinite freezing, and destruction of millions of embryos," explains Jordan Boyd of The Federalist.
Boyd goes into further detail. "Included in the self-proclaimed 'sweeping' bill are vague language and undefined terms that would force Americans with moral objections to ART to fund the manufacturing of motherless and fatherless children, commercial surrogacy, experimental transhumanist technologies like artificial wombs, 'gene editing,' and reproduction without women via in vitro gametogenesis," he explains. "Additionally, the package would make a permanent path for taxpayer-funded ART like egg and sperm freezing, IVF, and surrogacy for millions of U.S. servicemembers and veterans. It also incentivizes the promotion of babies by any means necessary above adoption and restorative reproductive treatments that address the root causes of infertility."
If Democrats were really interested in protecting the right to IVF treatments, they would, for one, push forward a clean bill that could get bipartisan support, and I suspect it would. But they won't risk putting forward a bill that might succeed and take the issue off the table for them before the election.
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