Trump's drops IVF promise, preferring to blame women for infertility

Trump’s drops IVF promise, preferring to blame women for infertility
Instead of treatment, Project 2025 proposes shaming patients for premarital sex

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published August 8, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) The mantra for President Donald Trump‘s many broken promises in his second term: Predictable, but still outrageous. No more is this truer than his false promises to make in-vitro fertilization (IVF) free to everyone who needs it to conceive. During the 2024 campaign, Trump was relentless in his vows to provide this fertility treatment at no cost to Americans. He often used headline-grabbing creepy language, calling himself the “father of IVF” and the “fertilization president.” At one town hall, he declared, “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way,” ensuring the unfortunate reporters there would rush to the hotel afterward for a shower.

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The promise of free IVF allowed Trump to pretend anti-abortion policies weren’t about punishing women, but was simply the result of his overwhelming love for babies and desire to see more of them. Feminists were always skeptical, noting that many abortion opponents also despise IVF, because what motivates them is not “babies” but a desire to strip women of control over their bodies and lives. Enough people bought the lie, which likely helped push Trump across the line in a photo finish of an election. For instance, the Washington Post profiled a Michigan woman named Ryleigh Cooper, who had reluctantly voted for Trump because she believed that he would make IVF free — only to have the administration cut her forest service job.

This week, Trump officially broke his promise. The White House admitted, after being contacted by reporters from the Washington Post, that there would be no attempts to provide free IVF. Again, that was predictable. It certainly was funny, however, seeing Andrew Schultz, one of the know-nothing “bro” podcasters who helped push their low-information audience into voting for Trump, flipping out over this about-face. Schulz, who went through the IVF process with his wife, seemed genuinely flabbergasted the notoriously dishonest president had lied about this. Sadly, however, Schulz doesn’t seem to have drawn the correct conclusion, which is that he should shut up about politics forever.

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Digging deeper into RRM materials revealed an even more sinister agenda: Blaming women for their infertility through false accusations that it’s caused by what the Christian right sees as sexual sin. Or, put more bluntly, it’s about shaming women for premarital sex and past use of birth control. The Heritage Foundation’s “report” on RRM wastes little time before demonizing the birth control pill as “a daily medication with no therapeutic purpose” and claiming, falsely, that the pill is the reason for infertility. “[F]looding her body with various pharmaceuticals and/or synthetic hormones via pills, injections, or devices,” they argue, disrupts the “natural” menstrual cycle they claim women need “for…good health and proper development.” .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/08/trumps-drops-ivf-promise-preferring-to-blame-women-for-infertility/