The Harris-Walz campaign is launching a bus tour and hundreds of millions of dollars in ads to make sure voters know where Trump-Vance stand on IVF and abortion, in spite of the Republicans’ gaslighting.
Is Donald Trump lying to the public about where he stands on abortion? It sure seems like it.
Trump thinks women are stupid and that we can be gaslighted. He seems to believe that he can do one thing when he talks to his extremist base and then turn around and smile at the overwhelming majority of Americans who want to see access to abortion and IVF protected and lie about it and will believe it,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a press call in which PoliticusUSA took part on Friday.
The Republican ticket plans to make IVF illegal, those on the Harris-Walz campaign call warned, emphasizing that the threat posed by the Life of Conception Act and Trump’s inclusion of the 14th Amendment in the party platform could ban abortion and endanger IVF.
“The point is to get protection, legal protection for IVF, that’s the bill we voted on in June, and that’s the bill that JD Vance voted against just shortly before Donald Trump picked him to be his running mate,” Warren told reporters in the Q and A portion of the call. “Donald Trump could have picked anybody to be his running mate, but he picked he picked a Republican who had just voted against legal protection for IVF.”
The Harris campaign is using personal stories like that of Latorya Beasley, a woman who lost access to IVF treatment because of the abortion ban made possible in Alabama due to ex-president Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees. They’re hoping to appeal to Republican voters who are empathetic to reproductive rights.
Trump’s presidency ultimately unleashed extreme abortion bans via his Supreme Court picks, which endangered IVF access nationwide via the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which led to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are children.
They alerted, “Trump and Vance’s MAGA platform promises to effectively ban IVF and abortion – and Trump continues to refuse to veto extreme legislation that would threaten access to IVF for families across the country.”
While this might seem hyperbolic, Beasley’s story laid out how the IVF process got pulled out from under her mid-process due to the implementation of an extremist anti-abortion law in Alabama. The campaign warned that Alabama is not alone because of Donald Trump, laws are now in effect in states across the country that contain language that could endanger fertility treatment and even contraception.
To bring it even closer to home, Reproductive Freedom for All President & CEO Mini Timmaraju pointed out that the Republican party platform “maintains radical and dangerous personhood language. It suggests that fertilized eggs should have full citizenship rights under the 14th Amendment. If enacted, this policy would ban abortion and threaten access to IVF and contraception.”
“Donald Trump knew what he was doing when he included the 14th Amendment in the party platform,” Timmaraju added. “They’re winking at the anti abortion extremists, telling them ‘Don’t worry about what else I have to say to get elected. This is what I’m really going to do.’ And you don’t have to take it from us, Students for Life call the inclusion of the 14th Amendment language ‘The most significant contribution’ that the Trump platform has made to their cause. SBA Pro-life America also touted the platform’s mention of the 14th Amendment.”
It’s notable, especially as Donald Trump tries to distance himself from his unpopular anti-women’s healthcare platform, that Trump and his administration appointed and worked with folks who believe the IVF process is murder, and Trump hosted the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the IVF ruling twice, including once while he was president in 2018.
JD Vance had just voted against a bill to protect IVF access and already had a clear record on this when Donald Trump chose him as his running mate. In case the goal isn’t clear, Vance also told CNN that Republicans need to embrace federal legislation against abortion, “Republicans need to shift their approach on abortion and begin to embrace federal legislation … ‘We can’t give into the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this matter,’ he told us.”
Trump himself has bragged about overturning Roe: “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone… Without me there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing. Thank you President TRUMP!!!”
When asked if Democrats should try again to pass another law to protect IVF mandating the government or insurance cover it, Warren made it clear that Republicans had already said no to the threshold question of whether IVF was legal, “The threshold question is whether IVF is legal and Vance says, ‘No.’”
After covering this topic for 13 years due to Republicans trying to ban abortion in states around the country, it’s fair to say when you hear the word “personhood” applied to fertilized eggs, it means that the women or girl carrying the eggs is no longer a full person.
“Personhood” does this by default, as when it comes to “life” and “freedom”, those rights can’t be applied to an organism hosted by a human being without taking rights away from the human being. This is another reason why abortion is considered a human right. It is the right of humans to have autonomy over their own bodies and anything inside their body.
So while the media might buy Donald Trump’s cynical two-faced talking points, it’s always best to look at what someone does rather than what they say, especially when they are a known liar. While Donald Trump might not enact a federal abortion ban, he has already signaled that he doesn’t view women as full human beings deserving of human rights and has little regard for IVF access.
Human rights are too important to leave up to just hoping that Donald Trump is telling the truth for once in his political career. The Harris-Walz campaign is trying to get the word out with their ad blitz and bus tour. There’s too much at stake for women to be gaslight by two men who wear their contempt for women and girls right out in the open.
When a politician signals that they have no respect for half of the population’s personhood, they should be believed.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
