Former President Donald Trump declared he was “the father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, while also saying he just recently discovered what the decades-old procedure actually is.
When told he was getting a question on in-vitro fertilization, Trump said, “Oh, I want to talk about IVF. I’m the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question.”
His questioner identified herself as a mother of three who has friends who are “very concerned that the abortion bans” sparked by the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade “will affect their ability to access IVF and other fertility treatments.” She asked what Trump would say to those women.
His answer included a number of mischaracterizations and inaccuracies — and a comment on the appearance of Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.
“So I got a call from Katie Britt, a young, just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama. She’s a senator, and she called me up like ’emergency, emergency’ because an Alabama judge had ruled that the IVF clinics were illegal, and they have to be closed down. A judge ruled, and she said, friends of mine came up to me and they were, oh, they were so angry. I didn’t even know they were going, you know, she, they were, it’s fertilization. I didn’t know they were even involved in — nobody talks about, they don’t talk about it,” Trump’s answer began.
The court case he was referring to was a decision from the conservative Alabama Supreme Court that ruled that frozen embryos created through IVF are considered children under state law, meaning people could theoretically be sued for destroying an embryo.
The court did not say that IVF clinics were illegal or needed to be shut down, but some clinics in the state paused treatments after the ruling for fear they could face legal ramifications.
The IVF process, which dates back to 1978, involves combining sperm and eggs in a lab to create embryos then implanting one or more of the embryos in a person’s uterus. Extra embryos are often frozen and stored, but also frequently discarded if they have genetic abnormalities or if patients do not need to use them.
Trump said he asked Britt for more information.
“And I said, explain IVF, very IVF, very quickly. And within about two minutes, I understood it,” Trump said, adding that he told Britt “we’re totally in favor of IVF.”
He then portrayed himself as leaping into action after his call with the senator.
“I came out with a statement within an hour, a really powerful statement with some experts, really powerful. And we went totally in favor, the Republican Party, the whole party. Alabama Legislature a day later overturned, meaning approved it. Overturned,” he said.
The statement Trump issued was on his social media platform Truth Social, and came one week after the court ruling and a day after a Republican state senator and state House Democrats had introduced a bill to protect IVF in the state.
Trump’s statement said, “I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” and that he was “calling on the Alabama Legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in Alabama.”
The legislature passed its bill ensuring some protections, and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey on March 6 — less than three weeks after the court decision.
Democrats have said the law wouldn’t have been necessary at all if not for Trump’s appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court having taken away abortion protections in 2022, but Trump maintained at the town hall that “we really are the party for IVF.”
“We want fertilization, and it’s all the way. And the Democrats tried to attack on it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than them, so we’re totally in favor of it,” he said.
Republican support for IVF is not universal; it’s opposed by some religious conservatives.
“Hundreds of thousands of embryos — each of them as fully human as you or me — are created and then destroyed or frozen in IVF procedures,” Pro-Life Action League President Ann Scheidler told Politico last month, after Trump declared that he was a “leader” on the issue during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump, who’s been trying to bolster support from moderate women, was asked by NBC News in August what he would do in terms of IVF if he was elected in November, and surprised many in his campaign and party by saying, “We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment.”
“We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay,” he added.
That proposal, which Trump has yet to release in any detailed form, is opposed by some fiscal conservatives, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
“I’m all for people making an individual decision on IVF. But the government has no money. We’re $2 trillion in the hole, so I’m not for asking the taxpayer to pay for it,” Paul, who has not endorsed Trump’s 2024 candidacy, said last month. “People get emotional about an issue, so they decide to completely pander and go way over a position they never really supported because they’re afraid people accuse them.”
On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign tried to walk back part of his remarks from the town hall — that’s he’s the “father of IVF.”
“It was a joke President Trump made in jest when he was enthusiastically answering a question about IVF as he strongly supports widespread access to fertility treatments for women and families,” spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Harris told reporters on Wednesday that Trump’s “father of IVF” claim was “quite bizarre.”
“What he should take responsibility for is that couples who are praying and hoping and working towards growing a family have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been put at risk,” she said.
The person considered the real “father of IVF” is Robert Edwards, a British physiologist who spent almost two decades developing the procedure. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 2010, and died in 2013.
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