The Trump administration’s ideas for expanding IVF reportedly include insuring it for servicemembers, declaring it ‘essential’ under Obamacare, and urging Congress to pass a new mandate.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) -- The Trump administration may soon be ready to unveil its final plans to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to establish a new federal entitlement to embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures, according to a new report.
The White House is preparing a report on ways to "combat infertility," and as part of those discussions is weighing a slate of policy ideas, the New York Times reports. Among them are adding IVF coverage to U.S. military health insurance, declaring IVF an “essential health benefit” that must be covered under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and calling on Congress to enact a federal mandate for private insurance companies to cover IVF.
READ: Trump should reverse his support for dangerous IVF, which harms babies and mothers
“Infertility doctors and other leaders in the industry, along with representatives of conservative policy groups skeptical of the procedure, have been shuttling in and out of the White House for months to meet with senior officials, including the chief of staff, Susie Wiles,” the Times reports. “The conversations have been both wide-ranging and highly specific, with aides signaling their interest in a variety of ideas that would make IVF accessible to a far greater swath of the country, some participants said.”
Administration spokesperson Kush Desai reaffirmed that Trump considers expanding IVF a “key priority,” saying that “close coordination with outside stakeholder groups across the political spectrum to inform our IVF access plan reflects our commitment to delivering on this priority for the American people.”
A bill enacting a new mandate would likely face an uphill battle in Congress, but Fertility Provider Alliance trade group chief TJ Farnsworth reportedly told the White House that much could be done “with a stroke of a pen,” i.e., executive orders. “Federal employee health benefit plans could be expanded relatively easily,” added Allison Swartz, an attorney for the "fertility benefits" company Progyny, which is also consulting with Trump’s team.
READ: Catholic sister writes open letter to JD Vance about moral alternatives to IVF
Whatever final form the Trump policy takes, it will mark one of the president’s more consequential shifts of the Republican Party since his return to dominate it.
After an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos qualified as children in a wrongful death suit thrust the issue into the national spotlight last year, most national Republicans rushed to declare their support for IVF (with just a handful of exceptions). Leading the charge was Trump himself, who cast himself as a “leader on fertilization” and even promised to enact a new federal entitlement to IVF, whether through direct subsidy or insurance mandate (though he also suggested he would support religious exemptions to the latter).
In February, Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to brainstorm administrative action and policy recommendations to strengthen IVF “access” and “affordability,” though not yet committing to a specific policy. A White House official later told the Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan that input from pro-life groups will be considered in formulating a final policy, but many pro-life and religious leaders continue to point out that any pro-IVF policy will be fundamentally anti-life.
The IVF process is gravely unethical, as it entails the conscious creation of scores of “excess” embryonic humans only to be killed and human lives being treated like commodities to be bartered over. It has been estimated that more than a million embryos are frozen in storage in the United States following IVF, and that as many as 93 percent of all embryos created through IVF are eventually destroyed. A 2019 NBC News profile of Florida IVF practitioner Craig Sweet acknowledged that his practice has discarded or abandoned approximately a third of the embryos it places in cold storage.
Pray for an end to IVF and the protection of human embryos: Join our prayer pledge
