Senator Tammy Duckworth

Democrats Push Reality as Republicans Try to Gaslight Country About IVF

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Democrats are not just sitting by as Republicans try to gaslight Americans about the inevitable consequences of their anti-abortion laws.

It wasn’t just Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) who took down the Republican attempts to backtrack on their attacks on IVF and reproductive rights.

Senator Tammy Duckworth tied Republican attacks on IVF to their anti-abortion rhetoric that led to the overturning of Roe.

“I’ve been talking about this since 2018 when it was very clear that Republicans were working to eliminate women’s reproductive rights,” Duckworth said on ABC’s This Week. “I said, if Neil Gorsuch gets put on the Supreme Court, if Amy Coney Barrett gets put on the Supreme Court, we’re gonna have an erosion of Roe v. Wade. And even back in 2018, I said IVF is next. They’ve said they’re coming for IVF. So unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised.”

Jen Klein, Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, wasn’t having it either. “Women in this country are being denied access to emergency rooms when they’re in the middle of having an emergency, whether they need an abortion or they’re having a miscarriage,” Klein said on MSNBC’s The Weekend.

“What just happened in Alabama is fertility clinics are now closed. They are unsure what to do. And these are people who desperately want a family, who desperately want a child – and now are unsure if that is legal to do in their state,” Klein added.

How we got here:

Problems for Republicans started when a survey “found that 86% of all respondents supported access to IVF, with 78% support among self-identified ‘pro-life advocates’ and 83% among Evangelical Christians.

After the strong reaction against the Alabama ruling against IVF based on the Republican argument used to overturn Roe v Wade by a conservative Supreme Court, Republicans were told to get out there and deny deny deny. They were told to express support for IVF.

The Senate Republican campaign arm memo urging members to come out in support of IVF came just “three days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos used in IVF are children and have legal protections under the state’s ‘personhood’ laws.”

And Republicans are doing just that, ignoring their own records to do so.

Here’s how that’s going: Rep. Byron Donalds says IVF is important because it helps couples “breed.”

Republicans are trying to run away from their own policies

What is behind all of this is the conservative notion of “personhood” attributed, but only when convenient, to embryos. There are many obvious ramifications from this unfounded belief, which Republicans have been well aware of for at least 20 years, so denial at this point beggars belief.

The bottom line is if “life begins at conception” as they argue, then embryos are human beings. The Alabama ruling allowed parents to sue for wrongful death of their frozen embryos.

This caused several fertilization clinics to cease their work, out of concern that they “could be held liable for embryos that are destroyed or lost.” The Alabama AG then tried to reassure everyone that he won’t prosecute IVF clinics and families.

However, the Alabama Supreme Court referred to IVF cryotanks where embryos are stored as “cryogenic nurser(ies).” That would certainly give pause to anyone concerned about legal liability.

Logically, there is no way out of this one: It’s either one way or the other. Republicans can equivocate about in utero versus in an IVF lab, but that argument undercuts their entire premise. Either life beings at conception or it does not.

Oh, and by the way, we all saw this coming. It is the inevitable next step of their premise, which has no medical or scientific foundation. If only Republicans hadn’t overturned Roe, their illogical attacks on freedom could have flown largely under the radar.

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