G.O.P. Candidates Distort Records on Women, Seeking to Blunt a Liability

For months, vulnerable House Republicans have been toiling to appeal to women turned off by their support for policies that would limit reproductive rights.

With just nine weeks to go until the election, many appear to have settled on a strategy: airbrushing or at times flatly misrepresenting their records in gauzy, family-focused television ads apparently aimed at those voters.

Some Republicans are claiming that they support protections for in vitro fertilization that they voted against, or that are at odds with legislation they have backed in the past. Others are vowing they would never ban abortion, though they previously said they would support doing so. One states that he cosponsored pro-woman legislation that he actually opposed.

What the advertisements have in common is that they mislead voters about the positions Republicans have taken on reproductive rights and other protections for women — topics that have become politically toxic for the G.O.P. in elections across the country, particularly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The effort to neutralize their liabilities with female voters has become more urgent for Republicans in Congress given the muddled messages on the topic from former President Donald J. Trump, their party’s candidate for the White House. Mr. Trump often boasts of his role in destroying nationwide abortion access but has recently expressed opposition to Florida’s strict abortion ban and portrayed himself as a champion of I.V.F.

In the first television ad of her campaign, Representative Michelle Steel, a vulnerable Republican from Orange County, California, sits in front of a fireplace as she tells her own story of struggling to start a family and turning to in vitro fertilization to