On Thursday, Donald Trump told an NBC interviewer and a crowd in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, that under his administration in vitro fertilization or IVF — a method for helping infertile couples have children — would either be paid for by the federal government or mandated for insurance companies to cover.
“We’re doing this because we just think it’s great. And we need great children, beautiful children in our country, we actually need them,” Trump said to NBC.
For a man who has called his political opponent Kamala Harris a “socialist,” this is a gobsmackingly, well, socialist idea. Depending on the circumstances, IVF costs $10,000, $20,000 or even $30,000 per treatment — and often multiple treatments are required to conceive a single healthy baby.
Almost 92,000 babies were produced by IVF in 2022 — about 2.5% of all births in the United States. In some European countries with socialized medicine, it can be as many as 5% of births. That could easily be a $20 or $30 billion expense. And whether paid by insurance companies or out of government coffers, we’d all have to foot the bill through higher taxes, higher deficits or increased insurance premiums. And the bills would only get bigger as our population ages and marriage and childbirth get put off further and further by each generation.
As “great” and as “beautiful” as children are and as much of a tragedy as it is when (mostly) couples who wait to have children find they’ve waited too long, this isn’t a government problem.
Socialism isn’t the only issue with Trump’s expensive new empathy for the childless. IVF produces more embryos than prospective parents can use — literally millions of them over time. Most of those created are discarded.
While most Americans don’t think much of aborting such tiny beings who have only grown for a few days, it is quite another thing to grow them on an industrial scale and discard them in such massive numbers. If creating and destroying millions of embryos isn’t genocide, at least it has an echo.
Some pro-lifers have argued that IVF should be banned because of the tiny lives that are lost. That’s not very popular with the public, but one of the most enduring compromises in our nation’s 50-year battle over abortion is a ban on federal funding for abortion called the Hyde Amendment. Trump, once the leader of a pro-life party, has decided to throw that compromise in the trash. That’s the same position as President Joe Biden, once a supporter of Hyde and now a fierce advocate of federally funded abortion.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to the conservatives, evangelical Christians and pro-lifers who have flocked to support Trump that he is willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He once was a donor to the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. Moreover, he has been on every side of the abortion issue over the course of his public life. It makes Harris’s shifting position on fracking seem built on solid ground.
The truth is that Donald Trump doesn’t stand for anything other than what is good for Donald Trump. It was good for Trump to be the guy who appointed the Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Once the politics shifted, it became good for Trump to return to his previous pro-choice sympathies, so he has, most recently, repudiated a six-week abortion ban in Florida before his campaign walked back his statements.
Where Trump really stands is anyone’s guess. One thing I know for sure is that his position isn’t done changing. Any fan of IVF tempted to join Trump’s cause because of his latest policy pronouncements should remember that.
David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com
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Publish date : 2024-09-03 00:01:00
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