In case you missed it, late last week the Huffington Post’s Alanna Vagianos unearthed Donald Trump’s deep ties to the anti-IVF movement. Trump, already well known as the face of the anti-abortion rights movement in the United States, gave lip service to IVF access, but according to the Huffington Post, his words remain incongruent with years of praising, appointing, and working with some of the nation’s most extreme thought leaders on reproductive health who have said the IVF process is the same as murdering children.
Key takeaways from Trump’s deep ties to the anti-IVF movement:
- Trump hosted the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the IVF ruling twice: once during his 2016 campaign and in 2018 at the White House. (The same chief justice who recently appeared on a QAnon conspiracist’s show.)
- As president, Trump met multiple times with Lila Rose, president and founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action, who recently said she was “proud” of the Alabama Supreme Court for acknowledging that “a baby conceived via IVF should have the same legal protections as a baby conceived naturally.”
- Lila Rose’s Live Action, which advocates that life begins at fertilization, likened Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signing IVF protections into law as giving doctors a “license to kill.”
- Trump praised Rose as someone he’s watched “with great admiration” when he introduced her during a 2019 White House summit on abortion.
- Trump appointed anti-IVF advocate, Tim Wildmon, as a member of his administration’s faith advisory council.
- Wildmon is the president of the American Family Association, an extreme anti-abortion organization that recently opposed a Mississippi bill aimed at protecting IVF because it would open the door to “procedures like human cloning, designer babies, three-parent babies and even human-animal hybrids.”
- Trump also appointed Sarah Pitlyk, a woman who spent much of her career attacking assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF and surrogacy, to a lifetime federal judicial appointment.
- Pitlyk, who was deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association, wrote in multiple rulings that states should treat embryos as humans.
- Trump put Pitlyk on a shortlist of Supreme Court justice picks. Instead, the job went to Amy Coney Barrett, who publicly supported an anti-abortion group that believes IVF should be criminalized.
- As president, Trump proposed a new faith-based rule that would allow health care workers to refuse to care for patients based on moral or religious beliefs. The rule would allow medical workers to refuse IVF to single women and LGBTQ+ people.
- Trump has not endorsed any IVF protections on the national or state level.
- Trump has given power to an extreme subsection of the anti-choice movement that believes life begins at fertilization.
- As president, Trump’s support of a national ban would go hand-in-hand with recent reports that his allies plan to infuse Christian nationalist beliefs into his administration if elected ― including attacks on same-sex marriage and restrictions on birth control.
Read the entire article here.
Published: Mar 18, 2024 | Last Modified: Mar 20, 2024