Report: Anti-abortion leaders helped tank Trump’s promise of free IVF

Anti-abortion advocates haven’t just played key roles in rolling back abortion rights in recent years. They also helped tank President Donald Trump’s campaign-trail promise to make in vitro fertilization free.

That’s according to a new report published Saturday in Politico, which reveals that anti-abortion activists—some of whom are opposed to IVF because it involves discarding unused embryos—spent more than a year lobbying the Trump campaign, and then his administration, to ensure that officials did not subsidize or mandate coverage of the procedure. They got their wish earlier this month, when the president announced a far more limited initiative: a cost-cutting agreement with a leading fertility medication manufacturer to slash prices on a drug involved in the IVF process. Trump also announced the creation of a new fertility insurance benefit that employers could voluntarily offer to employees.

“There were letters and meetings and calls—a lot of activity,” Kristi Hamrick, vice president for media and policy at the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told Politico. “We told [the administration] that it would be an absolute violation of people’s conscience rights to force taxpayers to subsidize IVF, which has the business model that destroys more life than is ever born.”

Anti-abortion advocates had long been vocal about their opposition to Trump’s promises to promote IVF. After his February executive order—which claimed to expand access to the procedure but merely required an official to gather ideas on how to do so, as I reported at the time—several leading abortion opponents decried the move. But the Politico story indicates that anti-abortion advocates’ involvement in scaling back the administration’s moves on IVF was greater than previously known.

“A lot of people met with different people within the administration over the last eight months to say, ‘This is not pro-life. This is not going to raise birth rates. This pumps money into an industry that a lot of pro-lifers have great concerns over, because of the potential for eugenics. So let’s tap the brakes on this,’” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told Politico.

Beyond the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Students for Life of America, other anti-abortion groups that were reportedly involved in pressuring the administration include Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Americans United for Life. Those groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday.

According to Politico, White House officials also gave the advocates a heads-up before Trump’s announcement of his IVF policies:

In a sign of how seriously they took the groups’ arguments, administration officials held a briefing call for a select group of activists ahead of last week’s announcement to address their fears of a coverage mandate. According to two anti-abortion advocates on the call, granted anonymity to discuss the private event, the White House did not take questions.

A White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about behind-the-scenes conversations, confirmed both the call and the key role anti-abortion groups played in developing the policy. Their influence ensured that no employer is obligated to cover IVF, that no federal funding supports it, and that new coverage options can include alternative fertility treatments promoted by groups who oppose abortion.

“It’s providing flexibility, not just in an ideological sense, but just in a medical sense,” the official said. “It would be bad policy just to push everyone onto IVF.”

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to Mother Jones.

Politico reports that anti-abortion advocates also pushed the White House Domestic Policy Council—which was tasked with coming up with suggestions to deliver to the president—to back “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM), a loose group of approaches that allegedly tackles the root causes of infertility, as my colleague Kiera Butler wrote last year. Leading medical organizations have said that RRM is not evidence-based and that it is not a distinct concept, but instead a repackaging of work that fertility doctors already do to support patients.

During Trump’s Oval Office announcement, officials did not explicitly reference RRM, but they—including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—did repeatedly say that they plan to address “the root causes” of infertility. An expert on IVF access who did not want to be named for fear of retribution previously told me they were concerned by these mentions: “On the one hand, we were happy because they didn’t say ‘restorative reproductive medicine.’ And on the other hand, we were concerned because they said ‘root causes’ several times.”

But for all the administration’s attempts to pander to every conceivable interest group, it could not manage to make everyone happy. Some on the left said that there was more Trump could do to expand access to IVF and that the announcement amounted to a failure to deliver on his campaign pledge.

On the anti-abortion side, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops called Trump’s announcement a “harmful government action” that could “push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.” Lila Rose, head of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said on X that Trump’s announcement is “not a solution to fertility struggles.” And Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, called the announcement a “disappointment.”