‘He’s listening to swampy people’: The anti-abortion and anti-IVF campaigners who feel betrayed by Trump

On Tuesday, Democrats held a vote to enshrine protections for IVF and mandate insurance coverage for the treatment. Unsurprisingly, Republicans blocked the legislation, with only Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joining Democrats to vote for the bill.

Former president Donald Trump had only just promised that a second Trump administration would mean free IVF for all Americans. Yet, even Trump’s running mate JD Vance failed to show up to work that day to vote on the legislation.

Trump’s overtures on IVF came after Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are children. The judge in that ruling specifically cited Dobbs v Jackson, the US Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade. In doing so, the Alabama judge made sure there was nowhere for Trump to hide: overturning the federal right to abortion led directly to another state court being able to say embryos have human rights, and therefore being able to ban IVF.

Since then, Trump has tried to walk a tightrope on both abortion and IVF. He knows that such hardline stances are unpopular with the wider American populace, and he fears what that could do at the ballot box — especially when even deep red states like Kansas ended up voting against abortion bans in recent referenda. His position is endlessly confused: He recently said that Florida’s six-week ban on abortion is “too short”, before he backtracked and said he would vote against a proposed constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion rights that will be on the ballot in his home state in November.

It’s not just progressives and those who fight for reproductive rights who are worried. For many conservative anti-abortion activists, Trump’s waffling feels like a confirmation