One Loud GOP Congressman Is Spoiling His Party’s Messaging On IVF

Republicans have been screaming from rooftops in recent weeks about how much they support in vitro fertilization and its availability nationwide, but one GOP congressman is threatening to blow up their strategy.

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) this week pushed an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would have banned funding for IVF, which he has called “morally wrong,” for defense personnel. He also put up anti-IVF posters outside his congressional office.

“My heart aches for folks who aren’t able to conceive children naturally,” Rosendale told HuffPost. “The problem is that this procedure produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million eggs a year, of which about 800,000 of them are fertilized and only somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 are being implanted and utilized. They come to fruition as children — full-grown birth children.”

Allowing federal funding for IVF, Rosendale claimed, amounts to “promoting an industry that literally kills more children than Planned Parenthood each year.”

Rather than allow a vote on Rosendale’s measure to put themselves on the record as supporters of IVF, Republicans omitted it from the list of defense bill amendments that will receive floor votes.

Republican leaders have said they don’t think Congress needs to act on IVF, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) pointed to Rosendale’s comments as evidence that the GOP is trying to do away with it.

“Watch what they do, not what they say,” Schumer said . “IVF is very much under threat. Democrats will not stop fighting to protect IVF access.”

In vitro fertilization became a massive political issue this year after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos are children, jeopardizing