Senate Democrats are continuing their efforts to put their colleagues across the aisle on record for their unwillingness to support reproductive rights following the Supreme Court ruling. Dobbs ruling that opened the door to a flood of state-level abortion bans. Last week, Democrats introduced a bill to protect access to contraception. This week, it will be a bill to protect access to assisted reproduction.
In response, Republicans have introduced two bills of their own that they say are just as good. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced a simple resolution demonstrating the Senate’s “support for Americans who are starting and growing families through in vitro fertilization.” Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Katie Britt (R-AL) introduced a bill that would exclude states that ban IVF from Medicaid funding.
On Wednesday afternoon, Cruz asked for unanimous consent to pass this bill.
Before the vote, Cruz tried, somewhat comically, to portray it as an attempt to Democrats has responded to the allegations regarding artificial insemination and appears to have been one step ahead of them by bringing his bill onto the agenda more quickly.
“Don’t get me wrong: If the remarks end with the words ‘I object,’ then Senate Democrats have made a cynical political decision that they don’t want IVF protected by federal law … because instead they want to spend millions of dollars on campaign ads suggesting that evil Republicans want to abolish IVF,” Cruz said on the Senate floor.
Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) blocked the Republican bill, calling it a “PR tool.”
“(This is) just another opportunity for Republicans to pretend they are not the extremists they prove time and time again to be,” Murray said on the Senate floor as she objected to the unanimous consent vote.
“The bill allows states to impose regulations that could significantly reduce the standard of IVF treatment, such as limits on the number of embryos that can be created and how each person can use them. These decisions should be made solely between patients and their doctors based on scientific evidence and clinical guidelines,” she added of the Cruz-Britt bill.
The Senate is expected to hold a procedural vote Thursday on Democrats’ Right to IVF Act, a bill that would protect and expand nationwide access to fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization. Democrats need 60 votes to overcome filibuster tactics and get to a vote. But just as with the contraceptive vote last week, Senate Republicans are expected to block consideration of the bill.
Dispute over topics of conversation
Before Thursday’s vote, they tried to walk a fine line: claiming they support access to IVF while simultaneously trying to find explanations for why they will not support the Democrats’ bill.
“I don’t think it serves any useful purpose other than partisan politics,” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told reporters Wednesday morning when asked about the IVF bill.
“IVF is legal everywhere,” Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) told reporters, deflecting questions about which parts of the Democratic bill he did not support.
In an election year when reproductive rights are front and center as a mobilizing issue for so many voters, the decision by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the Democratic leadership to follow the pattern of publicly bullying Senate Republicans into not supporting issues related to reproductive rights is a deliberate one.
But it does much more than that. It also opens a window into the way in which support for the concept of fetal personhood, post Dobbshas put Republicans in a bind, as evidenced by the party’s chaotic response to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that halted IVF treatments in the state.
Some Republican senators TPM spoke to on Wednesday leaned heavily on the argument Scott made: “Why protect something that is not at risk?”
This argument obviously trivializes the speed with which Roe v. Wade has been overturned, Americans may lose their right to access IVF. The Alabama ruling was an example: It found that stored embryos were entitled to the same legal protections as children under the Wrongful Death of Minors Act of 1872. It was the first decision of its kind, but it may not be the last.
The outcry in response to this state Supreme Court decision led state lawmakers to pass a law granting IVF providers civil and criminal immunity. Yet in the two weeks between the court’s decision and the law’s passage, many people in the state were unable to access IVF treatments.
“It is as if an anti-religious agenda is at work here”
When asked why he would not support the Democrats’ IVF bill, Scott told TPM that Democrats were “taking away religious freedom.” This argument was made earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, who expressed concern that the Democrats’ IVF bill would force religious institutions to offer IVF insurance to their employees, even if it goes against their beliefs.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) also made this argument, saying he supports IVF but not the Democrats’ bill.
“The Democrats’ bill is not about IVF, it’s about repealing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” Hawley told TPM. “It seems to me like there’s another agenda behind it,” he said, “it’s like there’s an anti-religious agenda at work here.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) also echoed this sentiment when asked about the bill.
“The (Democratic) bill specifically attacks religious freedom and forces people and organizations that object to assisted reproduction on religious grounds to participate,” Cruz told TPM. “That’s not right. We should protect assisted reproduction for anyone who wants it, but we shouldn’t force it on people who have religious objections to it.”
The issue is a sensitive one for Republicans, who are caught between apparent support for IVF – like most Americans – and opposition to the procedure among their Christian conservative base. As if to underscore this dynamic, the Southern Baptist Convention, an influential evangelical organization, voted Wednesday to condemn IVF.
“This is not about religion, this is about control,” said Colin Seeberger, senior counsel at the Center for American Progress Action, in a statement to TPM about Republicans’ refusal to support the Democrats’ bill. “Senate Republicans want to weaponize religion to give states a license to take away people’s freedom to raise their families as they wish.”
