Trump Gives IVF a Shoutout in the State of the Union Address

About an hour into his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump gave a shoutout to Catherine, a woman undergoing IV. Trump wished her the best of luck and said he knew she was going to make a wonderful mother.

It was a brief bit, and a callback to earlier Trump statements (he claimed last year that he would be “known as the fertilization president”). It may also have signaled something about a broader conservative divide. When it comes to IVF, the Trump administration is still courting the normie contingent, not the extreme social conservatives.

Trump mentioned Catherine during an extended brag about how he was bringing down health care costs. Her story was meant to highlight TrumpRx, a website launched this month to serve as a clearinghouse for finding low-price prescription drugs.

“The site does not directly sell drugs,” explained the Los Angeles Times. “Instead, consumers browse a list of discounted medicines, and select one for purchase. From there, they either receive a coupon accepted at certain pharmacies or are routed directly to a drug manufacturer’s website to purchase the prescription.”

According to Trump, Catherine was paying $4,000 for some IVF-related medication and will now pay only $500, thanks to TrumpRx.

That may or may not be true, and savings of that magnitude may or may not be typical.

What’s interesting about Trump highlighting this is that some conservatives have been taking issue with Trump’s “fertilization president” plans. Many pro-lifers outright oppose IVF, because it creates embryos that will later be discarded. Other conservatives think the administration should embrace pronatalist polices—efforts to convince women to have more babies and thereby raise U.S. birth rates—only if they are promoting nuclear families and heterosexual marriages. They want Republicans to focus on things like tax breaks, other incentives for parenthood, and “restorative reproductive medicine” that looks at the root causes of infertility. Assisted reproduction through IVF, by contrast, some see as enabling single parenthood, same-sex parents, and designer babies.

But in general, Americans overwhelmingly approve of IVF.

Trump’s choice to highlight a woman undergoing IVF, and his role in supporting this, suggests that this is one issue where he’s not planning to give in to the far right.