Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a declaration this week at a Fox News town hall on women's issues.
"We really are the party for IVF," Trump said.
"We want fertilisation that is all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we're out there on IVF, even more than them."
Trump was speaking about the medical procedure of in vitro fertilisation, and responded to concerns from women at the town hall about the Republican party's support for its practice.
"I want to talk about IVF. I'm the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question," he said.
The question was from a mother of three, who said she was concerned about recent abortion bans in the US and whether that would stretch to IVF and other reproductive procedures.
Trump said he had spoken to local representative Katie Britt about concerns around IVF, but insisted they were not valid.
"She called me up like 'emergency, emergency' because an Alabama judge had ruled that the IVF clinics were illegal and they have to be closed down," he said.
IVF was not made illegal due to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February.
Instead, the court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children.
"And I said, explain IVF, very IVF, very quickly. And within about 2 minutes, I understood it," Trump said.
How did we get here?
Two events have ignited a debate over IVF in recent months.
Alabama decision
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a decision in a unique case that resulted in at least three fertility clinics pausing IVF services.
The case was centred around three couples who had their frozen embryos destroyed when a patient at an Alabama clinic gained access to its cryopreservation unit and dropped a number of them on the ground.
The couples sued the clinic for wrongful death, and the Alabama Supreme Court ultimately ruled with the plaintiffs.
In its judgement, the Supreme Court said frozen embryos have the same rights as children.
The clinic appealed the judgement to the US Supreme Court but was unsuccessful earlier this month.
The ruling cast doubt on how to legally store, transport and use embryos, prompting some IVF patients to consider moving their frozen embryos out of the state.
IVF providers in Alabama also suspended treatment until further notice.
The Southern Baptist Vote
Months after the Alabama decision, more than 10,000 delegates gathered in Indianapolis for the annual meeting of Southern Baptists in June.
Described by The New York Times as a "barometer of evangelical sentiment", the group voted to oppose the use of IVF.
It did not ban the practice for its members, but called for:
- This resolution recognises the dignity of every human life from fertilisation to natural death
- It observes that while children are a gift from God, not all reproductive technologies are equally ethical, with in vitro fertilisation often involving the destruction or freezing of embryos.
- The resolution calls for only utilising technologies that respect human life at all stages, encouraged adoption including of frozen embryos, and committed to grieving with and praying for couples struggling with infertility.
According to the Pew Research Centre, evangelicals are a strong voter base for the Republican party and the motion resulted in a letter being sent to Congress asking them to consider pro-life policies in May.
The Republican Party's stance on IVF
Experts said the conservatives' view on IVF remained muddied by different posturing comments on the subject from both Trump and other representatives.
The IVF debate comes after the US Supreme Court in 2020 overturned Roe v Wade — a landmark ruling in 1973 that recognised Americans' right to abortion and legalised it across the nation.
It meant individual states could now decide if abortion was legal.
At least 13 states in America have banned abortion for all stages of pregnancy, while another four states have banned abortion after six weeks.
Another four states have banned abortion after six weeks, which is before many women are aware they are pregnant.
Before Trump declared he was the "father of IVF", Senate Republicans had twice blocked legislation from the Democrats that would federally protect access to IVF.
Flinders University's Prudence Flower, who specialises in US politics and the anti-abortion movement, said the Republican party had a complex relationship with IVF.
She said unlike abortion, IVF had huge levels of popular support across partisan lines.
According to a survey by Pew Research Centre, 70 per cent of adults said IVF access was a good thing.
"But for people who oppose abortion, IVF is problematic because the IVF process involves the creation of, often a large number of embryos, only one or two of which might end up being implanted," she said.
"So they view that as the destruction of human life. This kind of tension hadn't really come to light until Roe was overturned."
Dr Flowers said the aftermath of Roe v Wade created a renewed push for "foetal personhood" laws, which give legal rights of a person to foetuses and, in the Alabama Supreme Court case, embryos.
These laws exist in more than a third of states in America.
Dr Flower said Trump has been fairly consistent with his messaging around IVF access.
"When the Alabama Supreme Court found that embryos had rights, he disavowed that, and he said that the Republican Party strongly supported IVF," she said.
A 'real blurring' in the debate on reproductive rights
Dr Flowers referenced US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion after Roe v Wade was overturned.
The Justice outlined that the court should reconsider rulings from past cases that gave rise to rights including access to contraception and marriage equality.
"The court outlined the right to privacy in this way, within the 1965 Griswold v Connecticut case, which found that married people have a right to access contraception," Dr Flowers said.
"So privacy rights have always been strongly tied, first to contraception, then to abortion rights, and then eventually, in the 2000s, to same-sex privacy within the home."
There was a faction of conservative Republican and right-to-life activists, according to Dr Flowers, that argued popular forms of contraception were abortifacient, which means a drug that induces abortion.
"Anti-abortion activists have always claimed that the contraceptive pill and the IUD, some also argue the morning after pill, that those are all forms of abortion and should also be banned," she said.
"So there's this kind of real blurring for a subset of conservative Republicans around what they're willing to encompass in this kind of anti-abortion worldview."
Could Trump change his position on IVF?
Australian National University's Wesley Widmaier, who is a US politics expert, said the former president had positioned himself as a "paternalistic protector" of women.
"It's a very traditional gender role where Trump and the GOP are less forthright in protecting women's rights and expanding women's rights," he said.
"I mean, he said 'father of IVF', and it's right there. He's the father. He's the protector. But he's not someone who is enabling or supporting women to kind of exercise their own freedom of choice and liberty and those kinds of things."
Dr Flowers said she had concerns over how that could change if he were elected, despite Trump's consistent messaging around his support of IVF.
"If Republicans pass a bill banning IVF on religious grounds or banning federal support for IVF on religious grounds or various other things, who knows how he would interpret that," she said.
"He might again just say that ultimately, it's a matter for the states, and completely wash his hands of it.
"So I think there are interesting, disturbing tensions emerging amongst particularly conservative Republicans."
Trump's campaign later described his "father of IVF" comment as a joke.
"It was a joke President Trump made in jest when he was enthusiastically answering a question about IVF, as he strongly supports widespread access to fertility treatments for women and families," spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said.
