Trump’s Disturbing Support of IVF

This year’s presidential campaign recalls a criticism Benjamin Disraeli said about some of his fellow Tories on the issue of the Corn Laws. When a member of Parliament advocated for a position the opposite of his party’s traditional stance, Disraeli said, “The right honorable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.”

We have Ms. Harris suddenly announcing she believes in the wall at the border and mouthing populist rhetoric about the economy and military spending, meanwhile expressing her fervent belief that her “values” have not changed. The greatest value for a politician, it has been said, is getting elected. Most would say that they would not rather be right than president, for instance.

President Trump has also done his share of shape-shifting. It is possible to grant him that he always considered the abortion issue as a question for the states to decide individually, but it is impossible not to wince when he parrots the phrase “reproductive rights for women.” I used to say about some of Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks what a wag said of Disraeli’s inconsistencies, “you cannot respect him, you can only enjoy him.” 

He has exhausted my capacity to see the comedic value of his faux pas in the midst of this very serious campaign. Case in point: his embrace of IVF. He did not say he merely would tolerate the Brave New World of laboratory babies; he says now that he would make the government pay for anyone who wanted to conceive a family in a petri dish.

Why did he say this? I am sure the polling department of his campaign apparatus, presumably staffed by old cynics and ideological wonks see a vote-getting issue in IVF. Governor Walz, who claims to have used IVF, although previously had given out that his children were conceived by means of artificial insemination, has made an issue of infertility as an instance of social injustice. Talk about wearing the tattered remnants of your supposed Catholic identity on your dirty sleeve, but let that go! Why did Trump need to comment on IVF in a campaign that has greater issues of Himalayan proportions to scale?

A first response is that he is merely cynical. He is not going to let the IVF voters run over to the other side of the political divide. He is desperate to be re-elected and will not allow moral scruples to get in the way of his goal. Is he buying votes on promises of a huge budgetary expenditure? What the government doesn’t pay for, the insurance companies will be mandated to pay for and the insurance companies are not going to take the costly IVF bills out of their profits, but out of the pockets of those who don’t have government-subsidized health insurance.

A second theory is that Trump wants to be seen as a benevolent father figure and solve the problem of infertility. Not only is he in favor of IVF, he wants it to be government sponsored. There is always a kind of Daddy Warbucks vibe about Trump and here he is the rich man saying, “I’ll pay for that!” A grateful nation supposedly will then join the chorus of praise for this generosity.

Another reason is that Trump ignores the moral issues involved in IVF, which is to say that he is ignorant. His ignorance is shared, however, by legions of middle-class Americans who see the IVF issue in terms of the sadness of infertile couples and the triumph of medical technology, even when that technology has a Faustian hubris if not a Frankenstein-ian flavor. A malfunction in the freezer department of a Cleveland hospital resulted in the destruction of thousands of human embryos and the only people who seemed agitated about it were the lawyers. Aldous Huxley, eat your heart out: the futurist nightmare is now normal. Trump ignores the moral issues involved in IVF, which is to say that he is ignorant. His ignorance is shared, however, by legions of middle-class Americans who see the IVF issue in terms of the sadness of infertile couples.Tweet This

And it is taken for normal by many members of the middle-class. Putting embryos in the deep-freeze is usually about a career for the would-be mother, if we can still use that word. It is a bet against time and nature but is considered acceptable by broad swaths of the bourgeoisie, of which Mr. Trump is exempla gratia, although with some rough edges.  

I suppose it is part of the confusion of a society that has put the pursuit of happiness as an absolute. You want a child but not now, so you can either have an abortion, or perhaps less controversially put the embryo in limbo. What I want must be right because it is what I want and the alternative is inconvenient to me. Moral issues are all relative and what is possible should be legal because it is no one’s business to decide what I want to do.

Trump’s latest comment on IVF, however, takes things to a new realm: IVF as a human right. I don’t believe that the ex-president would say the same about aborting fetuses, or sex-change operations (remember under Obama a court-martialed traitor was given medical treatment to do that while a prisoner) or hormonal therapy to stop puberty. Government involvement in such matters is or should be deeply controversial. Throwaway lines during desperate interviews are not a great gambit for political discourse.

Social conservatives disgusted by Trump’s new rhetorical flourishes are upset for a good reason. However, we can’t pretend to ignore the alternative to a relatively conservative candidate sporting borrowed liberal clothes, is a radical relativist contrary to many values that are at the core of our fragile and fraying civilization. Would IVF get through Congress and get by the Supreme Court? Let us not forget that Ms. Harris would probably have government pay for transgender therapy, for abortions throughout pregnancy, and all sorts of surgical mutilations.

Is the ex-president the best of all possible candidates? Assuredly not. Do social conservatives have a serious alternative? I don’t think so. As Mary Ann Glendon reported in her memoir, St. John Paul’s decided on qualified acceptance of some of the conclusions of the U.N.’s Beijing Conference on Women, along with expressing serious reservations, just to remain in the battle for hearts and minds. Let’s hope and pray that the half a loaf we have doesn’t crumble away.