Despite his claim to be “the father of IVF,” Trump has yet to unveil plans to make it more accessible.Samuel Corum/Pool/CNP/ZUMA
Monday marked 90 days from February 18—the day President Donald Trump signed an executive order that falsely claimed to fulfill a campaign promise to expand access to in vitro fertilization, also known as IVF.
In reality, all the executive order actually did was commission a relatively low-level Trump administration official to submit to the president a list of policy recommendations. The deadline for those recommendations has now come and gone, and the White House has yet to announce any new actions to expand access to IVF or clarify its timeline for doing so.
Barbara Collura, president and CEO of the advocacy group Resolve: The National Infertility Association, is one of several advocates I spoke to who say they’re confused about whether the White House actually has any plans to help make it easier for Americans to have kids, as Trump and some of his closest advisors, including Elon Musk, have pledged to do.
“There was a big deal made about this executive order in February,” she added. “IVF is a big deal. This President has made it a big deal. It impacts a lot of people in our country, and we’re waiting. We would love to know what those policy recommendations are.” IVF can cost up to $20,000 per cycle, and less than half of states have laws mandating insurance coverage for fertility treatments, according to Resolve. More than 40 percent of American adults say they or someone they know have used fertility treatments, according to Pew Research.
In response to a question from Mother Jones on Monday night, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement: “The Domestic Policy Council has worked closely with external stakeholder groups over the past 90 days to deliver on President Trump’s executive order to formulate a plan on expanding IVF access for American families. This is a key priority for President Trump, and the Domestic Policy Council has completed its recommendations.” Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to repeated follow-up questions about whether the recommendations would be released publicly or whether any policy actions on IVF access would be forthcoming and when.
Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a research and advocacy organization, said he expects the White House will publicly announce the recommendations. But he acknowledged that “there’s some growing concern that this administration excels at making big announcements, and then…there’s not a whole lot there when you really start looking.”
Adding to Tipton and Collura’s frustration is the fact that their groups were not among those consulted by the White House on how to expand IVF access, despite their leadership on the issue. “We [didn’t] need 90 days,” Collura told me. “We’ve been doing this for 40 years. I could put these recommendations down in the matter of a couple of hours. This is what we do: We advocate for access.”
Back in February, Tipton ticked off a few ways that Trump could immediately expand IVF access, including requiring the health insurance programs for both federal employees and members of the military and their families to include fertility benefits, and pushing Congress to pass legislation that would require health insurance companies to cover IVF. Tipton had previously said he and other advocates wished the HOPE with Fertility Services Act, which would require health insurance plans to provide appropriate fertility coverage and had bipartisan support when it was introduced last year, would be re-introduced in March, but that has yet to happen.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who is co-sponsoring that legislation with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), said she hoped that Trump would deliver on his promise, and that she planned to continue advocating for the HOPE Act. “Trump promised frantic families that IVF insurance coverage was coming. I hope he doesn’t break their hearts now that the 90 days on his EO have lapsed,” she said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.
The New York Times recently reported that the White House consulted infertility doctors and conservative policy groups that are skeptical of IVF. The process typically involves discarding embryos, which some of the most ardent abortion opponents contend should be treated as full human beings. One of the companies named in the Times report, Inception Fertility, said in a recent post on LinkedIn that they were part of an alliance of fertility providers that went to the White House to make policy recommendations. One of their suggestions was to create a health workforce grant program to create more reproductive endocrinologists and embryologists.
That recommendation is particularly ironic given last month’s massive purge of workers from the Department of Health and Human Services. Among those whose jobs were slashed was the six person team working on assisted reproductive technology (ART), including IVF, at the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as I reported at the time. Their work included collecting data from assisted reproductive technology clinics on their pregnancy success rates. A former member of the team told me they were in the middle of researching how to make treatments cheaper through state-mandated insurance when they were fired. “How does cutting this program support the administration’s position?” the former staffer previously asked. “I don’t understand at all.”
Democrats and reproductive rights advocates have pointed to moves like the firing of that team—as well as congressional Republicans’ push to defund Planned Parenthood in the reconciliation bill and their repeated refusal to vote on a bill to protect IVF access during the last session—as an indication that Trump and his party do not actually care about expanding access to the treatment.
Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), co-chairs of the Congressional Reproductive Freedom Caucus, said in a joint statement provided to Mother Jones that the silence from the White House makes clear that “the Trump administration’s February Executive Order was nothing but an empty, performative gesture while they continued their assault on reproductive health care.” “We have always known that Donald Trump’s comments about IVF were lip service and that he was never serious about wanting to make IVF more accessible,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of the nonporift advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All.
