President Donald Trump spent the last few months of his 2024 campaign promising to force taxpayers to foot the bill for a procedure that routinely destroys human life. His plans to pave the way for Americans to make “more babies” by subsidizing in vitro fertilization, however, are allegedly on hold.
The Washington Post reported that as of Sunday, Trump’s White House is allegedly “backing away from proposals discussed internally to mandate IVF coverage for the roughly 50 million people on the Obamacare exchanges.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told WaPo that Trump “pledged to expand access to fertility treatments for Americans who are struggling to start families” and is still “committed like none before it to using its authorities to deliver on this pledge.” As of now, however, that goal reportedly does not include taxpayer-funded IVF.
WaPo’s chief economics reporter Jeff Stein painted the decision as “another apparent L from this admin for the conservative natalists.”
In reality, the Trump White House’s decision to ditch his plans for taxpayer-funded IVF is more on par with his professed platform than ever before. Committing tax dollars to the child-commodifying assisted reproductive technology such as IVF goes against the pro-life, pro-family, and pro-Make America Healthy Again principles Trump supports.
Big Fertility, whose biggest seller is IVF, routinely prioritizes profit over people. The industry offers anyone and everyone, regardless of their relationship status or sexuality, to buy their way into parenthood without regard for children’s natural rights. The consequences of this commodification include normalized eugenics, forced orphanhood, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, more than a million indefinitely frozen embryos, and deliberate ignorance of women’s health solutions.
Subsidizing IVF not only does little to fix the West’s fertility woes, including the record-low 1.6 birth rate recently announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but also kills more unborn babies than abortion every year. That’s because approximately 93 to 97 percent of the test tube babies created in labs won’t ever make it to the womb — and certainly not birth.
Trump is easily the most pro-life president in history, but his popular baby-saving track record would be in danger if he pushed for even more widespread use of IVF. Contrary to corporate media claims, nearly half of U.S. adults, 46 percent, say “a fertilized egg is a person with the same rights as a pregnant woman.”
Similarly, Trump’s emphasis on family and family formation would be endangered by all of the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by IVF-adjacent practices such as genetic embryo testing, premature embryo disposal, indefinite embryo cryopreservation, and pedophile-emboldening surrogacy.
One of the biggest enhancements Trump made to his second term was welcoming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the cabinet and elevating the MAHA movement with him. As I previously noted, the Trump administration’s adoption of the MAHA platform and its commitment to “promote health rather than just managing disease” is only valid, though, if applied to all health issues, including the increasingly common disease of infertility.
IVF does nothing to fix fertility issues. Instead, it pretends to treat its symptoms with a lengthy and costly technological procedure that guarantees nothing but the serial creation and destruction of little lives.
Researching and adopting fertility policies that address the root causes of infertility instead of treating is undoubtedly on par with the MAHA mission. If the Trump White House truly abandons taxpayer-funded IVF as an option, that leaves the door open for pro-woman, pro-baby solutions like restorative reproductive medicine to get funding and airtime.
If Trump is truly committed to his pro-life and MAHA reputations by ditching IVF subsidization as a legitimate policy option, that should be celebrated as a victory for not just babies, but families and the future of American fertility.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
