Tag: ivf
Abortion Rights

GOP Senators And Top Baptists Voted To Kill IVF, So Fox Buried The News

On June 12, Southern Baptists passed a resolution condemning many routine practices associated with in vitro fertilization, including the creation and storage of “surplus” embryos, citing the “destruction of embryonic human life.” On June 13, Republican senators voted against a bill that would have protected access to IVF. Both votes could have significant political ramifications, so naturally Fox News almost completely ignored them. The network ran only one segment discussing the Southern Baptist vote and notably did not discuss Senate Republicans’ move to strike down the IVF bill at all.

At the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, delegates for the first time waded into the debate surrounding IVF, affirming “that embryos are human beings from the moment of fertilization.” Although the resolution does not call for banning the procedure outright, some have argued that the organization's opposition amounts to “condemning the I.V.F. process as commonly practiced.” NBC News noted that the “measure was approved amid deep concerns that IVF is under increasing threat from the anti-abortion movement."

Fox spent a whopping two minutes discussing the Southern Baptist vote, with America's Newsroom anchor Dana Perino asking Kellyanne Conway about it in a segment devoted to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the abortion pill Mifepristone. Conway forcefully declared that not only is former President Donald Trump in favor of IVF but so is “every single Republican senator running for election this year.” She added, “This is one of those issues that I say has tri-partisan support. The majorities of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats — apolitically speaking — support access to IVF."

Fox thought the line was so compelling they re-aired Conway’s statement during a different show; however, the network went silent when just an hour or so later, Senate Republicans proved Conway wrong and voted against a bill that would have protected access to IVF nationwide. Fox News has not discussed the Senate vote a single time since Republicans struck the bill down.

This is just the latest example of Fox covering up Republicans’ plans and efforts to curtail reproductive rights. As Media Matters previously reported, Fox has frequently offered less coverage of stories pertaining to reproductive rights than their mainstream news competitors:

  • Earlier this month, Fox News devoted only 3 minutes to Senate Republicans blocking the Right to Contraception Act, compared to 17 minutes on CNN and 58 minutes on MSNBC.
  • Following Louisiana’s passage of legislation classifying the two most popular abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances in May, Fox did not air a single segment on the legislation. By contrast, CNN and MSNBC aired a combined 1 hour and 33 minutes of coverage of the legislation over the same six-day stretch.
  • In May, during the first full day of Florida’s implementation of a six-week abortion ban, Fox spent less than 1 minute covering the restrictive new policy.
  • Fox did not cover Trump’s medication abortion position in the weeks following his April interview with Time. CNN mentioned it twice, while MSNBC provided 7 minutes of coverage over 7 broadcasts.
  • In April, when an Arizona court revived a 160-year-old state law banning abortions under almost all circumstances, Fox covered the ruling for just 12 minutes that day, compared to 2 hours of airtime from CNN and 2 hours and 20 minutes of coverage on MSNBC.
  • In March, Fox covered the Supreme Court case that could affect access to abortion drug mifepristone nationwide for only 20 minutes in a 24-hour period while CNN spent over 1 hour on coverage and MSNBC devoted almost 4 hours to covering the case.
  • In February, Fox devoted less than 6 minutes of coverage over six days to an Alabama court ruling that frozen embryos are legally equivalent to children, even as state in vitro fertilization clinics stopped treatments in response.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for the term “block” or any variation of the term “vote” within close proximity of any of the terms “Republican,” “Senate,” “Baptist,” “convention,” or “faith” and also within close proximity of any of the terms “IVF,” “in vitro,” or “embryo” or any variation of any of the terms “fertility,” “reproductive,” or “contraceptive” from June 12, 2024, when the U.S. Southern Baptist Convention voted to condemn the practice of storing surplus embryos for in vitro fertilization, to 3 p.m. ET June 14, 2024.

We timed segments, which we defined as instances when the U.S. Southern Baptist Convention's vote to condemn the practice of storing surplus embryos for IVF or the U.S. Senate Republicans' vote blocking an IVF-access bill was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of either vote. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed either vote with one another.

We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned either vote without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about either vote scheduled to air later in the broadcast.We rounded all times to the nearest minute.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Ted Cruz

When Senate Republicans Claim To Support IVF, They're Lying

Democrats are expected to call for a vote Thursday on legislation that would protect access to in-vitro fertilization procedures. All 49 Republican senators have signed onto a letter supposedly signaling their support for IVF, but what the letter shows is that—just as they did on contraception—Republicans will vote to block this bill.

Because no matter what Republicans say, their intent is obvious in their actions. They mean to leave both contraception and IVF unprotected, subject to limitation by state laws now and a federal law later.

The vote on this bill comes a day after the conservative Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose IVF at its annual meeting in Indianapolis. Almost five decades after a conservative takeover, the SBC has become the bellwether of right-wing politics. And the vote on Wednesday makes it clear: Republicans can’t be anti-abortion and pro-IVF because their opposition to abortion is rooted in an ideology that simply won’t allow it.

Republicans briefly showed a flurry of support for IVF following an Alabama court ruling that shut down the procedure on a state level in February. Recognizing the overwhelming popularity of the procedure, Republicans—including Donald Trump—hurried to express their support.

Sen. Ted Cruz spoke out in the Senate Judiciary Committee to say that “IVF is fully protected in law, it should be fully protected in law, and it will remain 100% fully protected in law.”

However, the Alabama case illustrated just how vulnerable IVF was to the whims of state legislature and local judges. And now that Cruz has a chance to make sure that IVF actually is fully protected by law, he’s expected to vote against it. Republicans already voted down a bill supporting nationwide access to IVF in February, and now they’re scrambling for a way to appease their rampantly anti-abortion base while protecting the very popular procedure. They are not going to find it.

Like every other Republican, Cruz will continue to pretend that since IVF is already legal, there’s no reason to vote to protect it, which purposely leaves IVF’s legality open to challenge.

What Republicans aren’t saying is that they have a very good reason to vote against the Democratic bill. The over 10,000 delegates at the SBC not only voted to oppose IVF, they also called on the 13 million members of their affiliated churches “to advocate for the government to restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.”

If “frozen embryonic human beings” sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. But the moral and legal basis of Republican opposition to abortion lies on the equally ridiculous idea that “life begins at conception.” That idea is irreconcilable with protecting IVF because it inevitably produces excess embryos that, at best, will stay eternally trapped in a deep freeze.

Republicans might have hoped that, having been handed their long-time dream of overturning Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion forces would remain ever satisfied (and ever willing to donate and work for Republican candidates). But that’s not how it’s working out.

After destroying Roe, their base still wants more. They want a national ban. They want to end birth control. And they want to end IVF.

The bill introduced by Democrats would not just protect IVF, but it would also help to make it more available and affordable.

Expect Republicans to block the bill on Thursday, while continuing to give limp statements of support to IVF.

But that support won’t last. "Life begins at conception" isn't just a slogan; it's something with far-ranging consequences that Republicans mean to enforce.

If Republicans get a chance to draft their national abortion ban, don’t expect it to be too different from the language used by the SBC this week in Indianapolis, frozen embryonic Americans and all.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

No Place To Hide: The Abject Panic Of The 'Pro-Lifers'

No Place To Hide: The Abject Panic Of The 'Pro-Lifers'

Donald Trump just hates the issue of abortion. It’s messy. It’s nasty. It deals with women’s stuff down there, the part he has always just wanted to grab and then brag about. The big problem with abortion for Trump has been that that he has never wanted to take a position on it. When he said he would appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade, all he wanted to do was take the votes of the MAGA masses and move on.

The stickiness of abortion as an issue has never been as clear as it is right now with the Alabama Supreme Court essentially declaring that life begins at conception and applying that principle to IVF, and the Arizona Supreme Court concluding that they’re happy breathing life into an anti-abortion law that was written before Arizona was even a state.

The Arizona law was like those some states, mainly in the South, have on the books that make adultery illegal or forbid women or Black people from signing contracts or holding a bank account. The Republicans are like, yeah, sure, we know those ancient statutes are still around, but we’d rather just ignore them and move on, because we’re only trying to turn the clock back to the 1950’s, not the 1860’s.

But these two Supreme Courts blew the lid off the pro-life movement’s decades-long wish to seem reasonable and exposed the anti-abortion movement for what it has always been. It’s why they came up with the name “pro-life” rather than “anti-abortion.” They were trying to make it seem like they didn’t just want to ban women from getting an abortion; what really concerned them were the babies.

But even that was a lie. Babies, once they are born, never interested them. They want women either on the birthing table or at the sink scrubbing those pots and pans. In Texas, the desire to control women was so strong that the legislature wrote a law turning women’s neighbors into spies and giving them the power to sue women who had abortions as well as any person who helped or enabled women to abort a pregnancy after six weeks.

Watching the Republican Party, and especially its Maximum Leader, Donald Trump, try to tap dance around these two state Supreme Courts is providing us with some welcome opportunities for schadenfreude. You almost have to feel sorry for the poor fools serving on the Supreme Court of Alabama, with nine Republican justices either elected or appointed by Republican Governor Kay Ivey. They have got to be sitting there today thinking, wait a minute! What just happened? I just did what my party expected me to do, in fact, what they put me on the court to do! And now they’re getting roasted for it.

The analogy that pundits have seized to describe the current moment for Republicans is the proverbial dog who caught the proverbial car. What does the dog do now? Well, it turns out that what the dog does is look wildly around for a way to dislodge the car from its jaws, the car being the Dobbs decision and its rapid fall-out around the nation, all those anti-abortion laws that sprang to life in state after state, some of them truly draconian. The stories of women’s lives being endangered by the new anti-abortion laws have proliferated, including the one about the 10 year old girl in Ohio who was raped and had to travel out of state for an abortion because Ohio didn’t have an exception for rape or incest, even for a little girl.

All those Republican legislators and governors are sitting there today patting themselves on the back congratulating each other because they did what they were elected to do. And now comes the scrambling, not to fix the ugly laws they passed, but to repair the damage they know they’re going to suffer at the ballot box.

Donald Trump, bless his black heart, is leading the way. Look at this nonsense he posted on Truth Social today:

Trump is so panicked, so afraid of actually taking a position that would have any real meaning and effect, he is reprising his wishful thinking that the whole thing has been solved by the return of control of laws on abortion to the states. Well, here’s a state, asshole, and it’s a battleground state, Arizona, and what’s he calling for as a “remedy?” Exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother which aren’t in the 1864 nightmare of a law the Arizona Supreme Court just put back on the books. Boy, that’ll get it done, huh?

This kind of reshuffling of the deck of cards isn’t going to work, especially with an amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the Arizona constitution expected to be on the November ballot…along with the name of Donald Trump, the dog trying to get that damn car out of his mouth who is running for president.

If you want to see some professional-level reshuffling, allow me to recommend the David French op-ed published in the New York Times on Thursday. Here we have one of the preeminent pro-life intellectuals lamenting the fact that his movement doesn’t have a political party to call its own anymore, because Alabama Republicans quickly did an about-face on IVF after the Supreme Court shut it down in that state. Of course, legalizing IVF necessitates the destruction of fertilized embryos, which are, according to French, unborn children, and “the unborn child must not be intentionally killed.”

French, of course, is supposed to be one of the New York Times' “reasonable” conservatives, in this case, the “reasonable” pro-life one, who assures us elsewhere in his thousand-plus-word lament that he has been pro-life for “my entire adult life,” and defends his movement against charges that what it’s doing is seeking to control women’s lives, French assures us he has “never seen a desire for subjugation and control” in the pro-life movement.

Well, thank goodness for that. We all feel so much better now.

What French and the rest of them are doing is backing and filling now that the nation’s Supreme Court and the supreme courts of two states have dug the gigantic abyss they’re staring into. They’re trying to say, gee, we didn’t mean for this whole thing to go that far! We thought we’d throw these exceptions into the anti-abortion laws and that would take care of it for us! We didn’t know there would be this stuff like women going into sepsis! What the hell is sepsis, anyway?

This is what happens when men write laws about women’s bodies they don’t understand any better than the Chief Pussy-Grabber does. The thing that for decades they had treated like a simple issue to garner votes has turned out to be more complicated than they thought. If you want every embryo to be a little person, there are consequences, and as they discovered in Alabama, consequences demand compromises. As David French now whines, compromises are not pure and simple, they involve moral choices you once thought were easy and clean and now discover are messy and icky.

The dogs who caught the car are not happy. Boo fucking hoo.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Rep. Michelle Steel

Democrats Focus IVF Fire On Vulnerable GOP House Incumbents

Republicans continue to flounder when it comes to protecting access to IVF, and Democrats are intent on making it even worse for them. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign organization designed to elect House Democrats, released a scathing memo Monday, blasting “so-called moderate House Republicans” who seek “political cover by backing non-binding House resolutions that do nothing to actually protect access to this vital health care.”

“The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is poised to make House Republicans’ blatant disrespect for women and families a defining campaign issue,” the memo continues. They’re taking particular aim at members of the Biden 17—the 17 House Republicans who occupy districts that Joe Biden won in 2020—who have rushed out competing House resolutions to say how much they love IVF, but have refused to actually protect the treatment. They are empty promises, and Democrats won’t let them get away with it.

Democratic contender Derek Tran is using the DCCC’s message and running hard at GOP Rep. Michelle Steel in California’s 45th District, which Biden won by 6 percentage points in 2020. Steel is cosponsoring one of the nonbinding resolutions expressing support for IVF, but she is still a cosponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which declares that fertilized eggs have all the protections of actual human beings.

Steel is a “fraud,” Tran told NBC News. “She continues to spill out lies,” Tran said. “Just three weeks ago, she signed on to the Life at Conception bill. This is the second time she’s done that. And now she’s saying that she’s pro-IVF when the Life at Conception bill is anything but. So she still is just spilling out lies in order to get voters.”

Those vulnerable House Republicans sure aren’t going to get any guidance from their leadership. Here’s mushy Speaker Mike Johnson trying to have it all ways: “Look, I believe in the sanctity of every human life. Always have,” he told NBC. “And because of that I support IVF and its availability.” Oh, and he has “many close friends” who have used IVF.

“It needs to be readily available. It needs to be something that every American supports. And it needs to be handled in an ethical manner,” he said, complaining that there is “a lot of misunderstanding” about where Republicans stand on it. That’s no misunderstanding at all—that’s Republicans refusing to say whether they believe IVF needs to be statutorily protected.

This is a potent issue for Democrats, and they know it—from the Biden-Harris reelection team down to the DCCC. In a new CBS News/YouGov poll, a whopping 86 percent of Americans said IVF should be legal. The message from Democrats is simple: “House Republicans are flagrant hypocrites who have spent their entire tenure in the majority attacking reproductive rights at every turn,” Courtney Rice, a spokesperson for the DCCC, told HuffPost. “Now, they are hiding behind toothless resolutions and empty public statements because they know their relentless attacks on reproductive freedoms will cost them at the ballot box.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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