After Roe, IVF Is Republicans’ Next Beware-Of-What-You-Wish-For Dilemma

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W. VA. — House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) answer started simply enough.

Asked at an annual party retreat if Congress needed to “put its mark” on the debate over reproductive rights in light of the recent Alabama judicial decision equating destroyed frozen embryos with wrongful deaths, Johnson said the states, rather than the federal government, should decide what protections embryos should receive.

“It’s not my belief that Congress needs to play a role here,” he said. He said that states were handling IVF regulation well — even though the Alabama decision interrupted treatments and caused chaos for patients and clinics.

But almost as quickly, Johnson pivoted to praising vitro fertilization, in which the egg is fertilized outside of the womb.

“We support access to IVF,” Johnson said of Republicans, before saying he and his wife knew “many families” created through the procedure.

Johnson left unresolved the inherent tension between his belief, expressed in a bill he’s co-sponsored, that life begins at conception with the idea that IVF access was “something we ought to protect and preserve.”

And he also didn’t address the tension between the notion that the states should decide how to regulate IVF and the idea that discarding an embryo is, at least to Alabama’s high court, equivalent to ending the life of a child.

The back-and-forth answer to a simple question illustrated the dilemma Republicans face on IVF: They could champion IVF, even though the process often sees some embryos get destroyed or go unused, and side with public opinion; or chart the more radical course seemingly demanded by longstanding GOP rhetoric insisting life begins at conception, which would mean IVF should be available