Last week, Republicans in Congress introduced the . The claimed goal is to ensure that states do not ban the “pro-woman and pro-family” in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure through which of all babies in the U.S.
are born each year. Their political efforts to pander to suburban voters are a fool’s errand and intellectually incoherent. Earlier this year, Republicans also introduced a , which has the potential to make IVF riskier, more expensive and less effective.
Even Republicans are not sure how to reconcile their positions on abortion “ .” Since v. Wade was overturned two years ago, have pushed aggressive anti-abortion bans, even moving to criminalize of abortion pills.
These efforts are in sharp contrast to their attempts to appear supportive of IVF, a procedure that only a small of Republicans believe should be illegal. A prime example was Alabama’s immediate ban on abortion after overruled Roe and an almost equally speedy bill to protect IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled earlier that frozen embryos are people for purposes of wrongful death suits. After the court ruling, Republican politicians into trying to appear both “pro-life” and pro-IVF.
even explicitly exempt IVF from their abortion bans. The attempts to treat IVF as utterly distinct from abortion fail to recognize that both abortion and IVF concern nascent life and that IVF often involves the destruction of embryos. While abortion and fertility treatments like IVF might seem to be opposit.
