Why this Trump proposal is 'alienating 2 pillars of the GOP'

12 September 2024

Many of national and battleground state polls released in September are showing a very close presidential race, with Republican Donald Trump slightly ahead in some of them and Democrat Kamala Harris slightly ahead in others. Those polls include both male and female voters, but among women, Harris has a double-digit advantage.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll, for example, shows Harris with a 13 percent lead over Trump among women.

Trump, hoping to narrow that gap, has been promising free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. But many far-right white evangelical Christian fundamentalists — a key part of Trump's base — oppose IVF as vehemently as they oppose abortion.

According to Politico reporters Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly, Trump's IVF proposals are "angering swaths of the Republican Party — including evangelicals.

In an article published on September 12, Ollstein and Messerly explain, "The former president, eager to deflect attacks that his election would threaten fertility care, has gone so far as to pledge free IVF treatments to all Americans, paid for either by insurance companies or the federal government. It's a pitch designed to win back the moderate women who have moved away from Trump and neutralize Democratic attacks on his record on reproductive health that have dogged the GOP since the fall of Roe v. Wade more than two years ago…. But heading into the final weeks of the election, the proposal is alienating two pillars of the Republican Party: small-government deficit hawks outraged by the idea of a sweeping new federal mandate and religious conservatives who oppose IVF as commonly practiced in the U.S."

One of those critics is Ann Scheidler, president of the Pro-Life Action League.

Scheidler told Politico, "Though we share his desire for Americans to have more babies, Trump's plan to fund in vitro fertilization for all American women is in direct contradiction with that hope. Hundreds of thousands of embryos — each of them as fully human as you or me — are created and then destroyed or frozen in IVF procedures."

Patrick Brown of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center told Politico, "There are still bona fide limited-government conservatives in the Republican Party who look at this and say: 'Think about how expensive IVF is.' This could be billions of dollars for something that we think has significant moral complications. What is conservative about that?"

Read Politico's full article at this link.

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