Two House Republicans, Reps. Matt Rosendale (Mont.) and Josh Brecheen (Okla.), are asking the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees to not include provisions in the annual defense authorization bill that expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF).
The Thursday letter to the committee chairs and ranking members, first shared with The Hill, is an example of divisions that remain in the Republican Party amid threats to the fertility treatment. The topic came to the forefront after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, based on the social conservatives’ belief that life begins at conception — even as President-elect Trump and the majority of vocal Republicans say they support IVF.
“As you finalize the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025, we respectfully urge you not to include any House or Senate provisions that expand In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Specifically, the House passed Section 701. Assisted Reproductive Technology For Certain Members of the Armed Forces and their Dependents Under Tricare or anything similar should not be included,” Rosendale and Brecheen said in the letter.
“Section 701 is a dramatic expansion of IVF that will cost taxpayers approximately $1 billion per year. While we have great sympathy for couples who are having difficulty starting a family, IVF is ineffective, leads to the destruction of innocent human life, and does nothing to treat the root cause of a couple’s infertility,” Rosendale and Brecheen said.
Rosendale has become the top critic of IVF in Congress, filing multiple amendments to various bills to prevent funds from being spent on IVF. But with Rosendale on his way out of Congress, having opted out of a reelection bid, Brecheen’s name on the letter indicates that IVF skepticism will remain in the GOP on Capitol Hill.
The two Republicans bemoan the low rate of “fertilized embryos” that “resulted in a live birth.”
A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that 97,128 infants were born in 2021 due to assisted reproductive technology treatments, mainly IVF. The letter also claims that 4.1 million “embryonic children” were created that year, a number that came from an estimate by the conservative Family Research Council that cited a study on optimal number of eggs at retrieval. Some embryos that are created and transferred result in miscarriage, and not all eggs retrieved are fertilized.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine says fertility treatments such as IVF are “one of most highly regulated of all medical practices in the United States.” But like a lot of health care, it is governed by a patchwork of state and federal rules, and Rosendale and Brecheen think the rules are not strong enough. The federal government does not keep statistics about how many embryos are created through IVF.
“IVF continues to be heavily underregulated and is done without the needed ethical guidelines in place. There are no limits under current law on how many embryos can be created in an IVF cycle,” Rosendale and Brecheen said. “Members of Congress wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) asking for basic information including how many embryos are destroyed each year through IVF, how many embryos are screened for sex selection and genetic abnormalities, and whether the CDC has any moral or ethical concerns about how fertility clinics are currently conducting IVF. The CDC was unable to answer any of these basic questions.”
“Congress must protect the most vulnerable in our country and reject any provision that leads to the destruction of innocent human life and expands our nearly $36 trillion debt,” the lawmakers said.