Trump Contradictions Exposed In IVF Debate As Biden Trolls Republicans
Republicans are scrambling for a response to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling upending access to in vitro fertilization treatments in the state, and one very important person has gone silent: Donald Trump.
On Thursday, NBC News' Jonathan Allen reported that a Trump campaign spokesperson failed to reply to an inquiry about when Trump might weigh in. It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that Trump finally addressed the matter, saying that he would “strongly support the availability of IVF.” But by then, the Biden campaign and Democrats had pounced.
The right-wing ruling in a red state has put Republicans in a bind, forcing them to choose between their evangelical voters and the well-heeled donors who are increasingly turned off by the Republican Party's extremism. In Pew Research Center polling from last year, nearly 6 in 10 upper-income Americans said they or someone they know have used fertility treatments, such as IVF.
Even Trump's campaign surrogates dodged when asked whether embryos are children. “Well, I haven’t studied the issue,” Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said after casting his vote in the state's Republican primary.
In Trump's absence, however, the Biden campaign stepped in to fill the void. "Make no mistake: this is because Donald Trump overturned Roe v. Wade," President Biden tweeted Thursday, over a graphic of an Associated Press headline about an Alabama hospital pausing IVF treatments. The graphic included a picture of Trump alongside a quote of him taking credit for destroying the country's abortion rights: "I'm the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade."
But that wasn't Biden's only tweet about IVF on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Biden also connected the end of Roe to the IVF ruling, writing, "The Vice President and I won’t stop until we restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law for all women in every state."
The Biden-Harris campaign's rapid-response account tweeted out several damning tweets related to Trump's attack on reproductive freedom—including on IVF treatments—while he was president. One tweet included Trump's tortured 2019 announcement of nominating anti-IVF, anti-surrogacy judge Sarah Pitlyk to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge.
"She was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench and Trump even considered her for the Supreme Court," stated the Biden-Harris HQ account.
Another Trump appointee, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, refused to rule out criminalizing IVF treatments. During her 2020 confirmation, she said this:
In case there was any confusion about Trump's role in inserting the federal government into America's bedrooms, the Biden campaign wants to clear it up.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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