The big problem for Trump’s IVF plans

Last week, former president Donald Trump surprised most of the country when he said that a second Trump administration would force either insurance companies or the federal government to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

That announcement forced Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on the defensive when they hit the Sunday shows. Cotton for his part said he knew of no Republicans in Congress who opposed IVF, while Graham said the farthest he was willing to go was a tax credit for the treatment.

When Cotton was asked about the fact that he and all but two Republican senators opposed a bill to protect IVF, he called it “Chuck Schumer’s ridiculous messaging bill” and implied there was no point voting for it anyway.

It is true that Schumer put that bill on the floor during the summer as a way to put Republicans on record. These types of votes are standard, especially in an election year with a divided Congress.

Yet Schumer did so after the Alabama Supreme Court classified frozen embryos as children under state law back in February. That move sent fertility doctors — and would-be parents who were planning to rely on IVF to build their families — into a panic.

But if Cotton and Graham did not want Schumer to bait them, they could have easily voted for the measure, especially since it would not have passed the House.

And therein lies the rub. Trump’s proposal last week came out of left field and actually disrupts conservative plans and what much of the base believes about the practice.

Even more awkwardly, it contradicts what his own running mate, JD Vance, seems to believe about the subject. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Vance wrote the introduction to the