Former president Donald Trump described himself as the “father of IVF” during an all-female town hall event in Georgia, telling attendees that he would support in vitro fertilization should he be elected to a second term.
“I’m the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question,” he said at the Fox News town hall, which aired Wednesday but was taped the previous day. Trump also lauded “the courage of six Supreme Court justices” — three of whom he appointed — for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, two years ago.
Vice President Kamala Harris (D), speaking to reporters Wednesday in Detroit, described Trump’s comments as “quite bizarre,” given his role in Roe’s overturning, which opened the door for conservative attempts to limit access to IVF.
Gwen Walz, wife of Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), said Trump was “more like the father of Georgia’s abortion bans,” an apparent reference to the state Supreme Court’s recent reinstatement of a six-week ban on the procedure in a long-running legal battle sparked by the end of Roe.
The Trump campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has told media outlets that his remarks were “made in jest when he was enthusiastically answering a question about IVF,” adding that he strongly supports widespread access to fertility treatments.
Trump and other Republicans have struggled to navigate reproductive issues since Roe was overturned, a landmark decision that cast uncertainty over other reproductive procedures. In September, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to expand access to IVF, prompting Democrats to warn voters that Republicans could seek to ban abortion nationwide and that even non-abortion procedures such as IVF could be at risk.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, meaning that people could be held liable for destroying them. The decision limited access to IVF treatments in the state and compelled the Republican-dominated state legislature to quickly pass a bill that protected those seeking the procedure.
Trump has sought to blunt the political impact of Roe’s reversal by stressing his support for IVF, even promising, without detailing how, that he would make the procedure free if he returns to the White House. At the town hall event this week, Trump said the Republican Party was “the party for IVF” and that the GOP supports the procedure more than Democrats do. Those comments came after Trump said earlier at the town hall that he had to have Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.) explain to him what the IVF procedure was.
In her comments to reporters Wednesday, Harris said Trump “should take responsibility for the fact that 1 in 3 women in America lives in a Trump-abortion-ban state. What he should take responsibility for is that couples who are praying and hoping and working toward growing a family … have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been put at risk.”
High-quality public polls tracked by The Washington Post last month showed Harris winning women by an average of 10 points.
In addition to women, Trump has also been focusing on traditionally Democratic-leaning voter groups, including an interview with Black journalists in July in which he questioned Harris’s Black identity. On Wednesday, he sought to appeal to immigrants and Hispanics, taking an unusually measured tone while talking about immigration on the Spanish-language network Univision, and he has scheduled several late-in-the-campaign rallies in solidly blue states, including California, Colorado and New York.
