Trump’s IVF Executive Order Is a Distraction

This issue first came to a head last year, when antiabortion lawmakers in Alabama successfully passed a law declaring that embryos—including frozen ones at IVF clinics—were children. This caused all fertility clinics in the state to pause treatments, because embryos created for IVF are regularly tested and destroyed. If these cells were now legally children, clinics couldn’t effectively do the procedure without risking, essentially, murder. After a nationwide uproar, legislators in the state effectively created a loophole, writing a law that allowed for embryo damage or destruction for IVF specifically.

After the Alabama issue was resolved, Trump vowed during his campaign to protect IVF nationwide. In response to a question from a voter at a town hall in October, who said she was concerned about the further loss of reproductive rights after the end of Roe v. Wade in 2022, he called himself “the father of IVF” and said he “strongly supported” access to it.

Although experts say the House fetal personhood bill is unlikely to pass, this hypocrisy between the legislative and executive branches, both controlled by the same party, can’t be ignored. Simply, there’s no way to effectively do both at once.

“True reproductive freedom means not just protecting access to IVF but ensuring that every individual has the ability to make decisions about their bodies, their health, and their families—no matter where they live, who they are, or their economic background,” Christina Chang, executive director of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, says.

A fetal personhood bill is not the only threat. Most abortion rights activists I’ve spoken with are most concerned about the GOP’s attempt to restrict or ban medication abortion via the pills mifepristone and misoprostol. Republican lawmakers have proposed a bill that would ban medication abortion, but other tactics could be to attempt to pull the FDA’s approval of the pills or restrict the sending of pills by mail to states where abortion is banned (last month, a New York doctor was charged criminally in Louisiana for doing just that).

All of this to say, how are we supposed to interpret this executive order? After all, most fertility specialists and advocates would welcome IVF becoming less expensive and more accessible to all, and many praised the possibility of the government doing so.

“As a pro-life rabbi and father of nine children, I can confidently tell religious conservatives that there is nothing more pro-life than IVF,” Rabbi Moshe Margaretten, founder and president of the advocacy group Americans for IVF, tells me. “On behalf of would-be parents who need financial support to build their families, I welcome this announcement but note that the HOPE Act is our best guarantee.”

Margaretten is referring to a bipartisan bill introduced in the House in 2024, which would expand access to IVF through private insurance coverage. Another pro-IVF bill, the Right to IVF Act, which was heavily backed by Democratic Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, was blocked by Senate Republicans last year.

For Duckworth, Trump’s IVF executive order is a lot of smoke and mirrors. She says that we shouldn’t be “fooled” by the move, which she called “lip service by a known liar.”

“Donald Trump’s executive order does nothing to expand access to IVF,” she says in a statement. “In fact, he’s the reason IVF is at risk in the first place. But if he is actually serious about taking real action to accomplish his own campaign promise to make IVF free for everyone, there’s a simple way he can prove it: He can call on Senate Republicans to immediately back my Right to IVF Act that would require insurance plans to cover IVF.”