IVF And The Faithlessness Of The GOP
IVF And The Faithlessness Of The GOP
Republicans desperately trying to cover their tracks are running the same play as the Supreme Court justices who lied about settled law to get confirmed so they could overturn Roe v. Wade.
When Democrats endeavored in 2009 and 2010 to reform the health-care system and extend coverage to the uninsured, they chose the path of least disruption. They left in place existing systems that cover the elderly (Medicare), workers (employer-sponsored insurance), the poor (Medicaid), and veterans (the V.A. health system), and supplemented them with a new system for uninsured people. They’d buy health plans in a new regulated marketplace, and most would qualify for significant subsidies.
Barack Obama wanted everyone else to understand that he’d embraced this approach because it would leave the other systems in place. His shorthand for explaining this was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
As an elevator pitch it was pretty reasonable. Directionally, it was correct. But it was not literally true for every last insured person in the country. The Affordable Care Act also imposed new regulations on insurance carriers. It eliminated a class of scammy junk plans. It required insurers to add new benefits to their existing coverage. As such, when the coverage expansion began in 2013, some already insured people didn’t get to “keep” their plans. They got shifted into comparable ones, or better ones, or had to buy new plans online, and when their cancellation notices began arriving in the mail, Republicans erupted, seemingly scandalized by Obama’s broken promise.
If you followed politics closely a decade ago, you’ll remember this episode well. And if you’re a literalist, you’d have come away from the experience thinking Republicans were committed to absolute truth in advertising. Obama’s sin was to speak categorically about something that was true in general, and Republicans treated it as an unforgivable sin.
In reality, Republicans do not care about truth in advertising, per se.
To the contrary, they have embraced near-total faithlessness. Long gone are the days when they ran and lost on a plan to privatize Medicare—now they promise not to touch entitlements on the campaign trail, hoping to win enough power to simply break the promise. When their policies are unpopular or disruptive, they don’t even bother with Obama-style salesmanship, where policy and rhetoric at least point in the same direction. They now simply pursue a range of toxically unpopular policies, while telling voters they do not.
If you want an object lesson in a crucial difference between the two parties, contrast Obama’s sin with the GOP’s clumsy, all-hands effort to deceive the public into thinking it’s a champion of in vitro fertilization.
Last Friday, citing the GOP-imposed opinion in Dobbs, the Republican-controlled Alabama Supreme Court effectively banned in vitro fertilization statewide by endowing embryos with the rights of full-born human beings. Doctors cannot practically offer IVF as a form of fertility treatment without ultimately wasting some fertilized embryos. But in Alabama, that is now a violation of the rights of the embryos. And so IVF is, for all practical purposes, forbidden as a matter of civil law. Clinics across the state shut down their IVF practices; women and couples who’d sought and paid for fertility treatments had plugs pulled on their family planning, some after undergoing difficult hormone therapies.
The backlash was as swift you might expect, and as severe as it should have been. But the Republican Party’s response was not to defend their supposed principle that life begins at fertilization—that an embryo is a person. It wasn’t to update their broader views on reproductive rights, either. It was to lie. To insist that they, the party of Dobbs and the party that banned IVF in Alabama, simply loves IVF, wasted embryos and all.
As the Republican who bears the most responsibility for the GOP assault on reproductive rights, but who also has the least principled interest in the issue, Donald Trump led the way in notionally disavowing the Alabama ruling. Other Republicans, who’d been struggling to answer for the consequences of their agenda, followed suit—including many of the scores and scores in Congress who cosigned legislation that would codify for the whole country the same inalienable embryo rights that now exist in Alabama.
After careful consideration, Speaker Mike Johnson, an anti-abortion extremist who also sponsored the Life at Conception Act, issued a statement insisting “I support IVF treatment” (no he doesn’t), applauding the Alabama legislature “for immediately working to protect life and ensure that IVF treatment is available to families throughout the state.”
Trump, Johnson, and other Republicans managed to bamboozle reporters into treating this as the eccentric ruling of an unusual court, which Republican legislators would swiftly override. But this is wrong on multiple levels. Every member of the Alabama Supreme Court is a Republican—they are not members of some breakaway theocratic faction, they are Republicans. Their ruling builds directly upon Dobbs, which was imposed on the country by the justices Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court. And as an interpretation of the state’s constitution, it’s unclear what the legislature could do to protect IVF, short of advancing a new stipulation that embryos (at least some embryos) don’t share all the rights of people.
I’d like to see Mike Johnson and other national Republicans go another round on this question. If an embryo is not a person, then their war on abortion becomes even less politically tenable. If, in the ever-shifting Republican ontology, an embryo only becomes a person once implanted in the womb, then they’ll be on the hook for a universal abortion ban like the one on the books in Alabama. No six-week exception. No exceptions for rape and incest. Every reported miscarriage a potential civil-rights violation, if not a murder.
Their beliefs have toxic implications for public policy. They’ve thus chosen to lie.
Democrats can expose the lie by using popular policy as a wedge. After the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, Senate Republicans blocked Democratic legislation that would’ve protected IVF from state laws and rulings like the one in Alabama. If you want to know what their real aims are, what they do when no one’s watching, rather than what they say under duress, is the real tell. Maybe it’s time to give Republicans another crack at that bill.
But Democrats should make an issue of the lying, too. Most people hate liars. And journalists will continue to treat lies credulously if the rest of us aren’t crystal clear that nothing Republicans say on this issue can be trusted. They haven’t backtracked, they’re covering their old tracks ahead of the November election—no different than when Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and the other GOP-appointed justices lied about their views on settled law in order to get on the Supreme Court, then threw it all out the window.
Democrats have adopted a mantra to describe Republicans who call infrastructure bills “socialism,” then attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies when said socialism delivers projects and jobs to their states and districts: “vote no, take the dough.”
The line is effective in part because it reminds voters that Republicans opposed popular legislation, but the real sting is in the exposure of sleazy bad faith. Democrats should broaden that aspect of the critique.
Republicans also sabotaged their own border-security legislation so they could exploit the status quo for partisan gain. They’ve stabbed Ukraine in the back because the Russian government is helping Donald Trump cheat in the election. The IVF betrayal may be an even more naked act of cynicism. Here the goal isn’t to undermine the country for partisan gain; it’s to gain power by lying about their policy intentions, then impose those very policies on unsuspecting Americans on the “too late now, sucker!” principle.
In public opinion polling, trust is usually measured as a relative concept within the two-party binary. Which party do you trust more to [grow the economy, protect the environment, etc.]? But trust isn’t a relative concept, particularly now. It isn’t just that the public “trusts” Dems more than Republicans on the issue of reproductive rights. It’s also that the GOP can’t be believed. They should pay a political price not just for stealing the hopes and dreams and rights of millions of Americans, but for lying about it the moment their medieval ideas made first contact with reality.
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