On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris weighed in on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s baffling assertion earlier this week that he is “the father of IVF.”
Harris was discussing reproductive rights at a rally in Wisconsin when she called out Trump’s selection of the Supreme Court justices that ultimately helped end the federal right to abortion — and the role his party has played in threatening other forms of reproductive health care, such as in vitro fertilization.
The Democratic nominee charged that Trump has refused to “acknowledge the harm he has caused,” before playing a clip at the rally of Trump expressing his support for IVF.
“Now the man calls himself ‘the father of IVF,’” Harris said with a laugh. “I mean, what does that even mean?”
“He, by the way, is responsible for it being at risk in the first place,” she continued, adding, “He has no idea what he’s talking about ... when it comes to the health care of the women in America.”
Trump made the puzzling statement at a Georgia town hall event on Thursday focused on women’s issues.
“We really are the party for IVF,” he said at the event, hosted by Fox News’ Harris Faulkner. “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way. And the Democrats tried to attack on it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than them, so we’re totally in favor of it,” he said.
Trump has bragged about helping to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion, by appointing three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many states throughout the country have enacted abortion bans as a result.
Reproductive rights advocates have warned that the undoing of Roe could have consequences for access to fertility treatments in conservative states, as was the case in Alabama earlier this year. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should legally be considered “children,” spurring fertility clinics to halt IVF treatments. The state legislature passed a bill to protect IVF treatments in Alabama shortly after.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, told The New York Times in an article published Wednesday that the former president’s “father of IVF” comment wasn’t serious.
It was a “joke President Trump made in jest when he was enthusiastically answering a question about IVF,” she said.
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