GOP Bill Shields IVF Industry, Ignores Embryo Concerns

Republican Sens. Katie Boyd Britt and Ted Cruz introduced a bill on Monday that would force states contemplating a ban on in vitro fertilization (IVF) to choose between regulating one of the most profitable, unethical, unborn life-destroying practices on the market and keeping Medicaid funding.

The legislation claims states are not barred from “implementing health and safety standards regarding the practice of in vitro fertilization.” Any state or local government body that explores prohibiting IVF (something no state has seriously considered), however, will face the wrath of those who control the federal pocketbook.

“Our goal is to make sure that any family’s path to bringing a child into the world isn’t compromised by preventable legal confusion,” the senators wrote.

Pro-Life Picking and Choosing

In a Wall Street Journal opinion article promoting the bill, Britt and Cruz argued they are committed to protecting “Both Life and IVF.” Yet, throughout their legislative pitch, the Republicans failed to explain exactly how carving out federal protections for a practice responsible for discarding millions of embryos safeguards “life.”

Britt and Cruz acknowledged the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which confirmed the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” was marred by “confusion and misinformation.” Instead of critiquing the corporate media and “partisan” commentators who incited the political panic, Britt and Cruz egged on the concern with promises to “ensure IVF access is legally protected nationwide.”

The Republicans justified the introduction of the bill with poll numbers claiming IVF is wildly popular among Americans and framing the morally debated technology as a “pro-woman and pro-family solution” because it can end in the birth of a child.

Britt and Cruz both claim to believe life begins at conception and should be protected. However, they seem eager to overlook the reckless disregard for that life as long as it is the product of a lab.

IVF standard practice requires harvesting and fertilizing multiple eggs to increase the chances of successful petri dish conception. Since Americans undergo hundreds of thousands of IVF cycles per year, it’s no stretch to say countless unborn lives are created only to be pushed aside due to genetic grading, discarded, or abandoned in freezers.

It would be one thing if the Republicans were calling for even the most basic regulation of IVF. Britt and Cruz, however, are doing the opposite.

The pair noted in TV appearances on Monday that they believe IVF should be available to anyone and everyone who wants to create potentially motherless and fatherless children by any means necessary.

“This effort should be bipartisan, to make sure that every parent across the country who wants to bring life into this world, and may be struggling with infertility or others who [want] to use IVF to create the miracle of life brings it into the world and, you know, have certainty that that’s going to be available to them,” Britt told Bloomberg on Monday.

“People did not want anything to threaten IVF. I agree with that. Katie agrees with that,” Cruz added, noting that his colleagues in the upper chamber feel the same way.

According to corporate media, Democrats, and Republicans, even the slightest whiff of regulation for abortion, genetic testing, the premature disposal of embryos deemed “unviable,” reducing the chance of embryo survival via cryopreservation, and rapidly developing reproductive technologies such as artificial wombs and gene editing would “threaten IVF.”

Why It Matters

Republicans like Britt and Cruz are trying — as Democrats have in recent years in advocating for taxpayer-funded abortions — to weaponize Medicaid funding and strongarm states with moral and ethical concerns about IVF to score political points.

Anyone who truly believes life begins at conception, as research has proven time and time again, should be wary of extending immunity to a technology that is entirely rooted in the desertion and destruction of “leftover” life.

Republicans have successfully stopped, in Cruz’s words, Democrat attempts “to backdoor in broader abortion legislation” disguised as radical IVF protections. Their willingness to offer friendliness and support instead of skepticism and scrutiny to the wild, wild west that is the American fertility industry, however, only feeds the political beast determined to revoke and rebuke the sanctity of life in its most vulnerable form.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at Truth Voices and co-producer of Truth Voices Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.