Americans who actually believed Donald Trump’s campaign vow about in vitro fertilization are confronting an unfortunate reality: The Republican president doesn’t appear eager to keep his promise. The Washington Post reported:
The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.
For those who might benefit from a refresher, let’s review how we arrived at this point.
As Election Day 2024 approached, Trump seemed to realize that he wasn’t just struggling with women voters, he also was running against a Democrat who hoped to become the first woman to serve as the nation’s president. With this in mind, the Republican presented the electorate with a new idea: If elected to a second term, Trump said, he would make IVF free to Americans.
“The government is going to pay for it, or we’re going to get — we’ll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that,” Trump said in August. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?”
In mid-October, the Republican went further, declaring that, as far as he was concerned, he was “the father of IVF,” which was every bit as ridiculous as it seemed.
Oddly enough, after Inauguration Day, the president didn’t back off the promise right away. On the contrary, at a White House event in March, commemorating Women’s History Month, he returned to the issue unprompted.
“We’re gonna have tremendous, tremendous goodies in the bag for women, too,” the president said, referring to his administration’s agenda. “The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president, and that’s OK, that’s not bad. I’ve been called much worse. Actually, I like it. I like it, right? Thank you.” Around this same time, the president signed an executive order on IVF that did effectively nothing to make the treatments more affordable, his campaign promises notwithstanding. Soon after, as NBC News reported, the administration abruptly ousted the federal research team that tracked how well in vitro fertilization worked across the country. It’s against this backdrop that the Post reported that the White House is prepared to give up on Trump’s vow altogether. While these details haven’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that if Trump was serious about being known as “the father of IVF,” he’s going to be disappointed. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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