Anti-abortion advocates have been privately lobbying to sway President Donald Trump — the self-proclaimed “father of IVF” — away from his campaign promise to make in vitro fertilization free for Americans.
They’re claiming victory.
The White House is not planning to support an insurance coverage mandate for the procedure, The Washington Post reported this week.
“We’ve asked the Trump administration and the GOP to slow down and really take a look at the issue, and we’ve been heard,” said Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy for Students for Life Action.
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged that “all costs associated with IVF treatment” would be covered either by the government or through an insurance mandate. In February, Trump came up short on that promise, issuing an executive order directing the Domestic Policy Council to come up with recommendations to protect IVF access and reduce costs. The Domestic Policy Council delivered those recommendations to the president in May, but they have not been made public.
Hamrick told NOTUS that Students for Life has had “many conversations” with “members of the administration,” arguing it was a “moral issue to force all taxpayers to fund” IVF. Some anti-abortion groups view freezing and discarding fertilized embryos as unethical.
Anti-abortion group Live Action sent a memo, shared with NOTUS, to the Domestic Policy Council in June urging it to “reject public funding for IVF and oppose any efforts to mandate insurance coverage for the procedure.”
“While infertility is a heartbreaking struggle, solutions must respect the dignity of every human being, from conception onward,” the memo said. “Instead of supporting a practice that results in the destruction of innocent lives, the administration should champion ethical fertility treatments that offer true hope and healing for families.”
IVF opponents have been promoting restorative reproductive medicine, or RRM, which focuses lifestyle changes, hormonal balancing and supplements. The movement has found a home in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
This campaign has also made it to the White House.
Kaylen Silverberg, a reproductive endocrinologist who advises the White House on policies to increase access to IVF, told NOTUS in July that Vince Haley and Heidi Overton, the Domestic Policy Council director and deputy director respectively, had asked him about RRM.
Silverberg said that he told them he has “no problem with them … encouraging that at the beginning” of a person’s fertility journey. “The only area where we would come into conflict,” he said, would be if RRM was encouraged as a replacement for IVF and other similar assisted reproductive technologies.
“I said, ‘You don’t want to take us back to where we were 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and ignore 30 or 40 years of real science, hard science,’” Silverberg said. “It doesn’t benefit anybody to ignore all of that.”
In an early August interview, Silverberg said RRM was a “made-up term” to refer to practices that fertility specialists already do before they recommend that a patient seek IVF.
“It’s not like, ‘Hi, sign the form, give us your phone number, give us your insurance card and let’s go to IVF,’” Silverberg said.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says RRM should not be the primary or only option to treat infertility, and undergoing it could end up “potentially increasing” overall costs for people seeking to get pregnant. The organization said in a brief that it “opposes policies that seek to divert patients away from the full range of evidence-based assisted reproductive technologies and toward the unproven concept of RRM through financial incentives or other mechanisms.”
John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life, is among the anti-abortion advocates with the White House’s ear.
Mize told NOTUS he has had “very positive” conversations with Overton at the Domestic Policy Council and with the Office of Public Liaison, which is the White House office primarily charged with communicating and interacting with interest groups. He does not oppose IVF but believes RRM should be “the first-line course of therapy for women.”
“We’re on the planning phases of a family summit at the White House and we want this to be on the agenda,” Mize said. He added that Americans United for Life is working alongside the Institute for Family Studies, the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the America First Policy Institute on the summit, “and we’re doing everything we can to encourage [the Domestic Policy Council] to move forward on this idea.”
Lila Rose, the president of Live Action, said her organization has also “been in touch with the White House” and that she’s “grateful” that “it seems there’s an awareness of the White House about the infertility crisis, the fertility crisis, as well as the resources that exist like restorative reproductive medicine.”
Though Rose declined to name specific officials, she said “there’s multiple folks in the White House who are involved in understanding the infertility crisis.”
In mid-July, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly posted a planned $1.5-million grant to create an “infertility training center” focused on educating “on the root causes of infertility and the broad range of holistic infertility treatments.” Amy Margolis, the deputy director of the department’s Office of Population Affairs and who is listed as the grant’s main point of contact, declined to speak with NOTUS over the phone about the grant.
Vianca Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the department, said in a statement that HHS “is not currently soliciting applications for infertility training” and that the posted grant is a “funding opportunity in the future.”
“HHS is committed to prioritizing helping couples suffering from infertility,” Rodriguez added, pointing NOTUS to Trump’s February IVF executive order.
When asked whether the White House was leaning toward supporting RRM, Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told NOTUS that Trump “pledged to expand IVF access for Americans looking to start families, and the administration remains committed to delivering on that pledge and exploring all options that address the root causes of infertility.”
If Trump takes any action to promote RRM and steps away from IVF, Silverberg said, “he’s not living up to the promise that he — unsolicited — made.”
“He didn’t say, ‘I am the father of restorative reproductive medicine, I’m the father of infertility treatment, I’m the father of, you know, giving women drugs to make them ovulate regularly,’” Silverberg said. “He said, ‘I am the father of IVF.’”