- GOP Rep. Byron Donalds on Sunday affirmed the need for IVF for families across the US.
- “It helps them breed great families,” the congressman said of IVF on NBC News.
- Some Republicans have put some distance between themselves and fellow conservatives on the issue.
Last week, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos have the same rights as born, living children, quoting the Bible in their opinion.
Since then, Republicans nationwide have been scrambling to clarify their opinion on IVF, the fertility treatment that allows women to have multiple eggs fertilized outside the womb to better the chances of a successful pregnancy.
On Sunday, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida took to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he stated that he fully supports IVF, which helps people “create great families, which is what our country desperately needs.”
“The IVF procedure is very important to a lot of couples in our country,” Donalds said. “It helps them breed great families. Our country needs that.”
Despite the support of IVF from conservative lawmakers like Donalds, 125 of his fellow House Republicans co-sponsored a bill to establish that life begins at conception with no exceptions for the procedure. The expensive and time-consuming procedure can include the discarding of some fertilized eggs.
Donalds is not among the 125 House members pushing for the bill, telling MSNBC that he wanted to “see the devil in the details.”
However, the congressman’s comments reveal the wide scope of GOP reproductive theories, oscillating from “adoption is an option” on the subject of abortion to the desire to “breed great families” with IVF.
“I believe, as President Trump has also said, we really want the Alabama legislature to make sure that that procedure is protected for families who do struggle with having children,” Donalds said during his interview.
Last week, former President Donald Trump spoke of the need for IVF availability on his Truth Social platform.
“We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder!” the former president wrote. “That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America.”
After the conservative-leaning Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it escalated the stakes of issues involving abortion and family planning as individual states now play the paramount role in governing reproductive rights.
Republicans have largely struggled to counter Democratic messaging on abortion rights, with the issue playing a major role in a slew of races across the country since the 2022 midterms, when Democrats performed better than expected in what was forecasted by some to be a GOP “red wave” election.
Even in a conservative state like Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, a moderate, effectively campaigned on the issue last year by needling his GOP opponent over past support for a strict abortion ban without exceptions for cases involving rape or incest.
Beshear was reelected to a second term by 5 points in a state that Trump had won by 26 points in 2020.
