Does Trump’s platform say he would ban IVF?

The Kamala Harris campaign held a press call on Tuesday morning in which they claimed Republicans and former president Donald Trump are “attacking” access to in vitro fertilization. An email sent out advertising the call said, “Donald Trump’s own platform — linked on his campaign website — could effectively ban IVF and abortion in states nationwide.”

I found this to be surprising because I read Trump’s platform — linked on his campaign website — when it became official the week of the Republican National Convention. Of course, Trump has also publicly said that he supports IVF and wants to require insurance companies to cover the treatment. I double checked Trump’s platform just in case, and confirmed my suspicions. It reads, “We will oppose Late Term Abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”

Hmm, so where did they get the idea that Trump “could effectively ban IVF?” I hopped on the call with the intention to find out. I knew they were not talking about Project 2025 because they explicitly referred to “Trump’s own platform” as opposed to “Trump’s Project 2025,” as they often do. In fact, at the beginning of the call, Harris campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez claimed, “We already know how Trump and Vance feel about IVF because they have a record and a platform. Their official platform would ban IVF and abortion nationwide.” 

Ah, so now we’ve upgraded from “could effectively ban IVF” to “would ban IVF.”

I patiently listened to the rest of the call where they blamed Republicans for blocking a Democratic-backed bill to federally protect IVF treatment and cover the cost through insurers (the GOP prefers the Cruz-Britt bill, which does much the same but provides religious exemptions for providers who have moral objections to IVF treatments).

I was prepared to ask the Harris campaign where they found this secret clause in the Trump campaign platform but, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t called upon. The questions went to reporters at the Guardian, Politico, the 19th and NOTUS (who?). My favorite part was that all of the reporters asked the same question. It was a great exercise in media bias. Abbreviated excerpts from the call transcript:

NOTUS: For Senator Duckworth. I was just wondering after Trump said that he wanted to offer free IVF, um, have you heard from any of your Republican colleagues besides Collins or Murkowski, on whether they are seeking to support your bill this time around?

The Guardian: Um, that was similar to my question. So maybe if I could just broaden it out a little bit.

The 19th: Um, I have a similar-ish question to you. 

Politico: My question is kind of similar to some of the previous ones.

Thanks guys. Really helpful. Good journalism. Anyway, the closest we got to an answer actually came from the 19th reporter, who I suppose is a better spokesperson for the Harris campaign than the Harris campaign itself. She claimed that the portion of the platform that states “[establishes] Fourteenth Amendment rights for fetuses” could restrict IVF treatments, which is implausible because IVF treatments involve un-implanted embryos. For example, in Alabama, courts ruled that parents have a say over what happens to the embryos created during IVF treatment and thus can sue when clinics improperly dispose of them.

I reached out to the Harris campaign directly after the call to see if they could clarify which part of Trump’s platform would “ban IVF” and did not get a reply.

In related news, Kamala Harris also claimed in a statement Tuesday that a woman in Georgia died because of the state’s abortion restrictions, which do not permit abortions after a baby develops a heartbeat, usually around the sixth week of pregnancy. Harris said, “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down. In more than twenty states, Trump Abortion Bans are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care. Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again.”  Except, this isn’t what happened, according to the report she cited from ProPublica.

The woman actually took an abortion pill and had complications (you might recall that pro-abortion activists recently claimed that these abortion pills are totally safe when the Supreme Court was looking at a case involving the safety and efficacy of these drugs when prescribed through the mail). The woman was treated with antibiotics and other care at the hospital but was given a dilation & curettage (D&C) too late, and she tragically died from sepsis. The hospital was found to have not given her proper care, but ProPublica provides no evidence that the D&C delay was due to Georgia’s abortion law. In fact, as I’ve previously covered in this newsletter, there is no state law in the entire country that prohibits medical providers from performing D&Cs to remove fetal tissue once a baby has passed.

Bethany Mandel warned in The Spectator more thantwo years ago that fear-mongering about whether doctors can provide lifesaving care to women who are experiencing pregnancy complications or miscarriages is the real threat to their safety. “The doctors I spoke to said they encountered incorrect information about Dobbs and how it impacted their ability to provide patient care. They told me stories of confused and scared patients unsure if they still had access to basic, life-saving healthcare and doctors and nurses often reluctant to clear up that confusion or administer necessary care. Much of this fear and misunderstanding, they argued, is the result of a pro-choice refusal to provide clarity on women’s access to healthcare after Dobbs, because they want abortion be seen as a medically essential right,” she reported. If the hospital providers in Georgia did delay a D&C because of this confusion, which again, is unproven, the blame would not lay with the state’s pro-life law.

Harris’s statement only furthers this trend from the pro-abortion left. 

Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? hits theaters

Daily Wire host Matt Walsh recently released his new film Am I Racist? online and in theaters. I just finished watching the movie this week and it is great. Walsh goes undercover as a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion expert and sits in on an antiracism discussion group, interviews White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo and tricks her into providing cash reparations to a black producer on the film, poses as a waiter at a Race to Dinner event where white women are confronted about their “racism” and even hosts his own antiracism workshop where participants verbally accost his allegedly racist uncle (also an actor) and agree to self-flagellate with whips. It is a hilarious yet disturbing look at the highly profitable grift of antiracist activists who tell white people they will always be racist yet, with their expensive trainings, can be… slightly less racist?

I genuinely don’t know how Walsh managed to get through these scenarios without breaking character. 

A spokesperson for the Daily Wire tells me that the film made $4.5 million its opening weekend and was the fourth highest grossest movie at the box office. It outperformed a same-day theater release from Lionsgate, The Killing Game, and is the third highest grossing documentary to be released in theaters in the past decade. Thirty-six percent of the opening day audience was also non-white. It’s worth a watch, although it maybe could have been about twenty minutes shorter and cut out some of the evangelizing toward the end. 

Clinton calls for criminalizing ‘misinformation’

Hillary Clinton said during an interview this week that she thinks Americans who spread misinformation and propaganda ought to be held civilly or criminally liable for their words. “Whether they should be civilly or, even in some cases, criminally charged, is something that would be a better deterrence,” Clinton asserted. This is the latest example of a Democrat rejecting the First Amendment in favor of criminalizing protected speech. Governor Tim Walz has said that he doesn’t believe the First Amendment covers hate speech or misinformation (it does) and Kamala Harris called for social media sites to ban Trump in 2019, claiming, “there has to be a responsibility that is place on these social media sites to understand their power… they are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any form of oversight or regulation.”

Last month, I covered a Washington Post reporter asking the White House if they would take an active “role” in censoring “misinformation” that may have been shared during an X Space with Trump. “I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue. It’s a — you know, it’s an America issue. What role does the White House or the president have any sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that or sort of inter — intervening in that. Some of that was about campaign misinformation, but you know it’s a wider thing, right?” Cleve Wootson said during a press briefing.

This illiberal approach to speech is incredibly troublesome in a democratic republic and shows a flagrant misunderstanding of the Founding Fathers’ approach to free speech in this country. Read more here.