The Recent News on IVF Has Confirmed What Trump Is Coming for if He Wins Again

This is a lightly adapted version of a piece first published on Jill Filipovic’s Substack—subscribe to that here.

Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos kept frozen at a fertility clinic are actually “extrauterine children” and therefore considered people under Alabama law. In response, Alabama fertility clinics are predictably pausing some of their operations, recognizing that fertility medicine as it’s widely practiced may now be extremely legally risky and potentially even criminal in this new “pro-life” legal landscape.

Anti-abortion groups unsurprisingly see this as a win and plan to push for more. Denise Burke, senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-abortion group that has been a key architect of abortion bans nationwide, told the New York Times that the decision was “a tremendous victory for life.” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told the Times, “I can’t name one pro-life group that I know of that would say that they are OK with the I.V.F. procedure.”

And it’s these same anti-abortion groups hoping to end IVF and deem any fertilized egg a person who have the ear of Donald Trump, and are helping to create his second-term strategy.

Trump learned some important lessons from his first term. Chief among them: Don’t cater to or staff your team with moderates or “reasonable” Republicans. Find people with the ability and inclination to carry out your desires, no matter who objects or what it costs the nation.

The people who have stepped up to the plate are Christian nationalists and newly emboldened anti-abortion groups—although “anti-abortion” doesn’t even cover it, given that these same groups are working to scale back access to reproductive health care including contraception and fertility treatments. And none of this is a secret; they’ve literally published a playbook on their strategy.

Leading the effort to force through far-right legislation, democracy be damned, is the Heritage Foundation. It’s also working with a series of other groups, including just about every major anti-abortion organization, to radically reshape the government and the country. The next president, these groups write in their Mandate for Leadership, must enshrine conservative values and crush liberal ones, starting by “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

And that’s just the start. Some of the most extreme anti-abortion groups, including those that oppose IVF and many forms of contraception, have the ear of the man they hope will be president, despite his stated claim that he’d only restrict abortion after 16 weeks. “The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly,” Hawkins told Politico. “Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”

Hawkins’ group and some of the country’s other most extreme anti-abortion groups are already working with Trump to map out how his administration might swiftly and thoroughly strip abortion access from all Americans. These groups are clear that on Day One of a Trump presidency, they expect their man in the White House to end the Biden administration’s directive that medical workers have to save pregnant women’s lives, even if doing so requires offering those women abortions. A Trump Environmental Protection Agency will be told to reclassify abortion pills as “forever chemicals,” which will subject them to even tighter regulation. A proposal from one anti-abortion group would mandate that any doctor who prescribes the pills will be tasked with retrieving and disposing of the embryo or fetus post-abortion—an absolutely insane, disgusting, outrageous rule that is wholly impossible to carry out in practice. Some of the groups with Trump’s ear just want him to ban the pills entirely, rolling back FDA approval of one of the safest prescription medications on the market. I don’t see any universe in which Trump would not sign a national abortion ban if one were delivered to him.

Contraception is on the chopping block, too. The first Trump administration cut off Title X funding, the federal dollars for low-income family planning services, to any clinic that so much as told women they had the legal option to end their pregnancies. That will no doubt be repeated if we get Trump II. But the administration may go farther. Anti-abortion groups, including two of the country’s (and a future Trump administration’s) most influential—the Alliance Defending Freedom and Students for Life—have long been laying the groundwork for the argument that the most effective contraceptive methods are actually abortifacients and that “conscience” rules should allow any person the right to refuse providing contraception services. That would include doctors and pharmacists but also employers who provide health insurance plans, an argument that was already affirmed by the Supreme Court in Hobby Lobby. As law professor Mary Ziegler lays out, a core argument in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe was an originalist one that abortion rights do not have a long history of recognition and protection in the United States. Well, the same is true of contraception. And the Supreme Court case that enshrined the right to contraception into law was based on essentially the same legal reasoning as Roe. Which is why I have a really, really difficult time seeing how this conservative Supreme Court could or would uphold the contraception cases after demolishing the entire premise behind them.

Ending the right to contraception would, of course, require a case to go to the Supreme Court. “Pro-life” groups, most of which either oppose contraception or are mum on the issue, realize that their anti-contraception positions are wildly unpopular in a nation in which the vast majority of women use contraception at some point in their lives, and where contraception has led to far fewer maternal and infant deaths, happier marriages, longer-living adults, and freer women and men (most men, like most women, do not wish for a world in which there is a much higher probability that any sex act may trap them into parenthood). So I would not expect today’s anti-abortion movement to prioritize overturning the Constitution protections for contraception—but that’s mostly because they still have many, many more abortion bans to pass.

Still, I do expect them to press Trump to use any authority he has (and authorities he doesn’t have) to make contraception much harder to get. And eventually—perhaps sooner rather than later, because this is not a movement known for its timidity—they will come for the constitutional protections of contraception access. Some of the most influential leaders of these groups, who are now among the chief architects of Trump’s second-term agenda, have been clear that they see ending or radically scaling back contraception access as crucial for their Christian nationalist agenda. Russell Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and remains a top pick for his future chief of staff; he’s also the man drafting many of Trump’s post-2024 plans. And he’s close with former Trump administration official William Wolfe, who shared his suggestions for how to “restore the American family” on Twitter, writing out a neat list:

Obergefell is the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage. And some of these same conservative groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, are coming for it.

In other words, those leading Trump’s second-term plans want the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy, governed by biblical principles—that is, biblical principles as these far-right groups interpret them, which also includes putting migrants into internment camps and brutalizing innocents at the U.S. border.

The fundamental goal here is what these right-wing groups call “restoring the American family.” By that they mean enshrining an extreme brand of American patriarchy that has never actually fully existed here. They want to cut off aid to single mothers in an effort to pressure them into marriage. They want to restore a man’s right to be the financial and political head of his household, with his wife and children legally subservient. They want to remove women’s abilities to control our reproduction and determine the number and spacing of our children, because they know that without that ability, we simply cannot be as free as men—cannot pursue education to the same degree, cannot pursue anything in life we might want, will simply be tethered to more-powerful men and see our lives and our futures curtailed. This is also why these same right-wing actors oppose things like no-fault divorce, which enables women and men alike to end unhappy or abusive marriages.

Also on the list: surrogacy, which is certainly ethically and morally complex and worthy of discussion and policy debate, but in the direction of “how do we best protect the world’s vulnerable” and not “how can right-wing psychos best oppress women.” IVF, too, is on the chopping block, because it’s awfully hard to give a fertilized egg a full set of rights and also allow those eggs to continue being created in labs, frozen, and sometimes destroyed.

I don’t know that I even need to mention gender-affirming care, do I? Because obviously that’s under attack from the right, and not just for kids—these right-wing maniacs simply want to diagnose any trans person as mentally ill, and they seek “correction” rather than the basic freedom for adults to decide for themselves how to live. LGBTQ+ rights that are widely popular and that many thought were settled, including basic nondiscrimination rules and the right to same-sex marriage, are also in the right’s crosshairs. And conservative Supreme Court justices are signaling, loud and clear, that they may be open to overturning the case that secured same-sex marriage rights for all Americans. And they may be willing to go even further, putting anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination outside of the bounds of standard anti-discrimination law, including laws that ban gender discrimination.

Does Trump actually care about abortion, contraception, LGBTQ+ rights, or any of this stuff? No, not really. But he does care about securing and maintaining power. And the only people left who are willing to help him do that—and who understand the basic mechanisms of American democracy well enough to break them—are these religious right extremists who are willing to assist Trump in exchange for getting some of what they want. And what they want, more than anything, is the establishment of a firm gender hierarchy with men at the top.