GOP Urged to Restrict IVF, Though It’s Political Suicide

Abortion politics have become deadly serious since Roe was overturned. Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

The relationship between the anti-abortion movement and the Republican Party used to be largely a lopsided arrangement benefitting the GOP. The movement supplied party foot soldiers, vast small-dollar donations, and large blocs of Republican votes, and obtained in return an awful lot of symbolic gestures and a stack of IOUs that could have reached the moon. So long as abortion rights were (more or less) guaranteed as a matter of federal constitutional law, Republicans didn’t pay much of a price for being the anti-abortion party in a country where the right to choose prior to fetal viability was not only the law of the land, but was consistently a popular position.

All that changed, of course, when Donald Trump delivered what Republican politicians had teased for all those years: a Supreme Court that would reverse Roe v. Wade. Suddenly abortion was no longer a symbolic issue to most voters but an urgent and impossible-to-avoid priority. And now all those IOUs Republicans cheerfully wrote to the people who believe in using the power of government to force every pregnancy to full term are coming due.

And as GOP politicians are beginning to realize, to their horror, it’s not just a matter of being on the wrong side of an aroused majority of Americans who would prefer that Roe were still in place. Their anti-abortion allies want laws and policies reflecting their own extreme views on when the “right to life” begins and women’s rights abruptly end. That’s why the Alabama Supreme Court decision in February imposing the doctrine of fetal personhood on IVF procedures was such an important landmark.

As Politico reports, even as Republican politicians (in Alabama and elsewhere) have tripped over each other to affirm their love for IVF treatments and distance themselves from the belief that every fertilized ovum deserves the same legal protections as me or you, anti-abortion activists are girding up their loins for a new battle to reassert control of the GOP:

Anti-abortion advocates worked for five decades to topple Roe v. Wade. They’re now laying the groundwork for a yearslong fight to curb in vitro fertilization. …

Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have been strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.

In short, they want to re-run the Roe playbook.

It’s true that in the days immediately after Roe was handed down in 1973, the anti-abortion movement was centered among Roman Catholics, with conservative Evangelicals being either disengaged from the battle or even modestly pro-choice. The emergence of abortion bans as a conservative Evangelical political cause célèbre didn’t really take hold until the 1980s, and it was part of a general mobilization against feminism, “non-biblical” lifestyles, and the alleged persecution of conservative Christians. Fetal personhood, however, was always a tough sell even among conservative Evangelicals precisely because of the implications for IVF, that most “pro-family” of medical treatments, not to mention wildly popular methods of contraception that operate by interfering with the implantation of a fertilized ovum in the uterine wall.

Fetal-personhood ballot initiatives in the states (three in Colorado, and one each in Mississippi, North Dakota, and Rhode Island) have uniformly gone down to overwhelming defeat. The most significant test was in Mississippi in 2011, when a proposed state-constitutional amendment that defined as a “person” every “human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” Despite backing from this deep-red state’s Republican governor and lieutenant governor, the initiative lost by a 58 percent to 42 percent margin, which was in fact the high watermark for such measures.

So how do anti-abortion ultras plan to turn this around? According to Politico’s interviews, they plan to work on opinion-leading elites in both the political and religious worlds:

Organizations including Heritage, former Vice President Mike Pence’s group Advancing American Freedom, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s public advocacy-focused Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission have worked behind the scenes over the last few weeks to distribute talking points, circulate policy recommendations and educate Republican officials and their staff about their ethical concerns with how IVF is commonly practiced in the United States. …

At the same time, they have been having conversations within their conservative Christian circles that have revealed how much work they need to do to convince evangelicals that there are ethical problems with the procedure. Most evangelical denominations have not taken firm stances on restricting fertility services like IVF.

Add it all up, and fighting to limit IVF is a big-time political loser:

A CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this month found that 86 percent of respondents thought IVF should be legal, and a survey released in December by a firm run by Kellyanne Conway, former President Donald Trump’s former senior counselor and campaign manager, found that IVF had 78 percent support among self-identified “pro-life advocates” and 83 percent among evangelical Christians.

In other words, those anti-abortion activists who viewed the reversal of Roe as just the first step toward a national regime of fetal personhood are facing a situation where the demands they are placing on the GOP amount to political suicide. No matter how much Republicans owe to the forced-birth lobby, they are going to fight like hell to liberate themselves from its grip, most especially in the 2024 elections, when most GOP politicians would prefer never to hear the word abortion uttered on the campaign trail. Trump’s threat to make a 15-week abortion ban part of his own campaign agenda could be the least of their problems.