Donald Trump described himself as the “father of IVF” in a pitch to win back female voters concerned about Republican restrictions on reproductive rights.
Fielding questions at an all-women town hall in the battleground state of Georgia, Trump attempted to clarify his party’s conflicting messaging on a key election issue.
“I’m the father of IVF. We are totally in favour of it,” Trump said in answer to a question by an audience member concerned that various states’ abortion bans would affect women’s access to in vitro fertilisation.
Republicans “really are the party of IVF”, he told Harris Faulkner, the host of Fox News channel’s The Faulkner Focus, on the segment aired on Wednesday. “We want fertilisation and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them.”
About 110 women, thought mostly to be Republicans, attended the town hall
MEGAN VARNER/GETTY IMAGES
However, he conceded that he did not understand the specifics of the fertility treatment until it was recently explained to him by Katie Britt, an Alabama senator. “She explained IVF very quickly and in about two minutes I understood it and I said ‘no no, we are for it’,” he said.
IVF became a flashpoint in the nationwide clash over abortion and reproductive rights this year when Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos were children and those who destroyed them could be held liable for wrongful death.
• How IVF is splitting Trump’s Republican family
Trump and Republicans quickly distanced themselves from the case, with the nominee even claiming he would enact a federal policy making IVF, which can be prohibitively expensive outside of health insurance, free of charge.
But Democrats, led by Kamala Harris’s campaign, have argued that the ruling offered a preview of the policies Trump would seek to enact if he returned to the White House.
Protesters convened at the Alabama state capitol to protest in favour of abortion rights in 2019. The state has among the most restrictive policies on the issue
MICHAEL SPOONEYBARGER/REUTERS
About 110 women from local churches and mothers’ groups attended the town hall in Cumming, Georgia, according to Fox News. Audience reaction suggested most were Republican voters.
Trump, 78, appeared more focused than he had at other recent campaign events, where critics described his behaviour as “erratic”, “bizarre” and “freewheeling”.
Women have emerged as a core weakness for Trump’s campaign. For women younger than 45, abortion has overtaken the economy as the single most important issue to their vote, according to Siena College polls for The New York Times last month. The nationwide survey showed Harris leading in support with women by 14 percentage points, while Trump led with men by 13 percentage points.
The yawning gender gap has been attributed, in large part, to Trump’s role in appointing the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 judgment that had protected the constitutional right to abortion.
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Two thirds of Americans said they opposed the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a Marquette Law School poll conducted this summer. The issue was widely thought to have cost the Republican Party at the 2022 midterm elections.
In the Fox News town hall, Trump was asked: “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?” In response, he criticised some states for placing restrictions on abortion that he called “too tough”, saying, without providing any details, that those laws are “going to be redone”.
“The states are now voting [on abortion rights in state-wide referendums], and honestly, some of them are going much more liberal, like in Ohio,” he said. “You have to follow your heart, you need the exceptions of rape, incest and life of the mother.”
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JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running-mate, acknowledged the difficulties navigating the issue during his recent debate with Tim Walz, Harris’s pick for vice-president. “We’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly just don’t trust us,” Vance said.
Harris, 59, who has made access to abortion a key plank of her platform, was quick to attack Trump’s town hall claims. “Donald Trump called himself ‘the father of IVF’. What is he talking about?” she asked in a post on social media. “His abortion bans have already jeopardised access to it in states across the country — and his own platform could end IVF altogether.”
To coincide with the event, the Democratic National Committee put up billboards across battleground states like Georgia to remind voters of Trump’s “extreme” position on abortion.
One of the adverts circulated by the Democrats this week
Trump faced questions on a number of other topics, including immigration, trans issues and the economy. He said he would ban trans competitors in sports, which drew the loudest applause of the hour-long event.
One member of the audience — a single mother who said her child tax credit had reduced by 80 per cent and she could not afford daycare — asked what Trump could do to help as president.
“My daughter Ivanka drove me crazy on this — ‘Dad, we have to do child tax credit’,” he said. “And I did it, and she said: ‘Double it up’. We are going to readjust things so they’re fair to everyone.”
