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Donald Trump has indicated he would consider religious exemptions to his IVF mandate that would require insurance companies to cover the costs of the fertility treatment.
“It sounds, to me, like a pretty good idea, frankly,” Trump told the Catholic news channel EWTN on Thursday evening while attending the annual Al Smith dinner in New York City.
“Certainly if there’s a religious problem I think people should go with that. I really think they should be able to do that but we’ll look at that,” Trump said.
Some conservative voters do not support IVF – a fertility treatment that involves extracting an egg, fertilizing it with sperm in a lab and then transferring it into a uterus or freezing it – as they believe destroying embryos is “killing”.
Earlier this year, the conservative Alabama Supreme Court passed an extremely unpopular law that declared frozen embryos, created through IVF, are considered children which meant people could be held criminally liable for destroying unused embryos.
Trump immediately came out against the law and has since softened his once pro-life stance on abortion to appeal to liberal, moderate and conservative voters who use IVF to have children.
He told people during a town hall this week that the Republican Party is “the party of IVF” and falsely claimed Democrats attacked him on the issue.
Trump bestowed himself the title of “father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall for promising a policy that would mandate insurance companies or the government pay for the medical procedure.
His boasts on IVF are part of an attempt at trying to earn the support of moderate women voters who may have turned their back on him after he took credit for nominating three Supreme Court justices who overturned the landmark abortion ruling Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The ruling allows states to enact their own abortion rulings – at least 13 have implemented near-total abortion bans which have caused dire and sometimes fatal medical complications for women.
