Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at her presidential campaign’s first rally in West Allis, Wisconsin on July 23, 2024. Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK
“Happy World IVF Day to everyone except J.D. Vance,” was the headline of a statement Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign posted to social media yesterday, which was World IVF [in vitro fertilization] Day.
Harris is already making reproductive freedom a central issue in the campaign in the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that includes the issue of IVF, which the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against earlier this year. And Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) – the GOP vice presidential candidate – has a record on the issue that makes it easier for Harris to make it a campaign issue.
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IVF is a fertility procedure where several eggs are fertilized outside of a person’s body, allowed to grow for several days, and then transferred back into a person in hopes of resulting in a pregnancy. In order to have a decent chance at succeeding, the procedure requires several fertilized embryos to be created, some of which are stored for later cycles of IVF. Many of those fertilized embryos will either fail to implant or never be transferred to a person’s uterus.
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The procedure is often used by same-sex couples who want to build their families, and it is the most common method of assisted reproduction.
Because the procedure requires fertilized eggs to be created that likely won’t lead to pregnancies, many on the right oppose the procedure. This past February, the supreme court of the state of Alabama ruled that fertilized embryos have the same rights as children, saying that laws about “unborn children” also apply to those “located outside of a biological uterus.”
“True to form, JD Vance is marking World IVF Day by insulting couples struggling with infertility, demeaning women’s choices and their freedoms, and reminding voters about his and Donald Trump’s anti-IVF Project 2025 agenda,” Harris’s statement says. “It’s par for the course for Vance, who voted against legislation to protect IVF access, and his boss Donald Trump, who promised to fight ‘side by side’ with opponents of IVF and refuses to commit to vetoing a law that would endanger IVF access in all 50 states.”
The statement was referring to comments Vance made several years ago, calling her a “childless cat lady” who’s “miserable” because she never gave birth to any children (she is a stepmother to two kids). Vance also attacked out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (R-NY) in those comments, saying that they should not have political power because they don’t have children (Vance’s comments were made weeks before the Buttigieges announced the adoption of their twins).
The bill Harris was referring to was the Right to IVF Act, which came up for a vote in the Senate this past June, after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against IVF. The bill would have established a national right to IVF and other assisted reproductive technology and made IVF more accessible by lowering treatment costs. It failed to pass, and Vance voted against it.
Vance hasn’t explained that vote, but he told the Washington Examiner earlier this year that he is “pro-fertility treatments.”
He was asked in the interview whether he agrees with the Alabama Supreme Court on whether fertilized embryos have rights, and he dodged the question, instead saying that “babies are good, families are good.”
“I want there to be as much access to fertility treatment as possible. And I think 99% of people agree with me, Democrat, Republican, or in the middle,” he said.
The issue is that if fertilized embryos are human beings with similar rights – as many anti-choice activists argue – then IVF, which relies on creating many fertilized embryos with the knowledge that most of them won’t result in a pregnancy, is untenable.
That is, both abortion and IVF “kill babies” if one defines a baby as starting at fertilization. But unlike abortion, IVF helps people have more children, making it more popular with some on the right.
Vance has made extreme statements opposing abortion in the past, writing on X in 2023, “There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.”
Project 2025, the 900-page manual created by rightwing activists as a blueprint for Trump’s possible second term, doesn’t recommend restrictions on IVF. The document does, however, call on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death.” It also says that “our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities,” implying that fertilized embryos should be treated as human beings with rights.
