Kamala Harris Bashed Donald Trump on IVF: Here's What Doctors Think

Alan Wolpert got married in his early-40s. His wife was in her early-30s, and "at that point, almost by definition, she was high-risk pregnancy."

The couple met with a specialist at New York University.

After going through a miscarriage and embryo testing, Wolpert said the couple was "completely demoralized." After a few years, next option was donor eggs.

"It was the best chance for us to have a healthy baby," Wolpert said. "When we did that, we were successful. In fact, we created enough embryos that after our son was born we were able to create some frozen embryos and we were able to thaw one out years later that was my daughter."

The Vice President Kamala Harris campaign along with many parents and psychologists are concerned that a second former President Donald Trump presidential term could threaten access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) nationwide even more, as the Republican presidential nominee already worked to ban abortions.

"We have two kids that are healthy and doing well. We're extremely lucky," Wolpert said. "It's highly offensive that politicians that don't understand this process and who speak about being pro-family will try to limit other people's opportunities to grow a family."

According to a CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this year, 86% of those surveyed said IVF should be legal for women trying to get pregnant. About one out of every seven responses said the process should be illegal.

What is IVF?

IVF is a process in which an egg is paired with sperm "in glass." After the fertilized egg, a zygote, undergoes a culture for up to six days, it is transferred by catheter into the uterus. The process is meant to assist reproductive health and be used for infertility treatment, surrogacy and pre-implementation genetic testing.

"People don't appreciate how common this is," Amelia Swanson, a health system clinician at Northwestern University, told Newsweek. "It's really a lot of people that are impacted."

Between 2017 and 2019, 10% of women ages 15 to 44 said they received some form of fertility service, according to the Pew Research Center.

Earlier this year when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that some providers in the southern state need to suspend their in vitro fertilization (IVF) programs, former President Donald Trump posted to TruthSocial that he wants to "make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder!"

The Harris-Walz campaign, however, shared that Trump "appointed an openly anti-IVF judge to the federal bench and wouldn't rule out signing legislation that would endanger IVF access for families across the country.

"Because of Donald Trump, women relying on IVF are losing their chance to grow their families out of fear the state will take control of their embryos. It's a nightmare straight out of Trump's Project 2025 agenda," Harris Walz 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said. "If he wins this November, it will only get worse."

Project 2025, the playbook of sorts for a conservative administration, calls for the recognition of fetal personhood from the moment of conception. This would restrict research, creation, storage of embryos as well as the discarding of non-viable embryos.

"I just see a lot of politicians on the right who are intellectually inconsistent about the whole issue of IVF and of abortion in general," Wolpert said. "The right has always been historically about giving people privacy, having less government, but they said 'well not about this where we're happy to walk right into your bedroom and control your life.'"

Wolpert noted that while he and his wife would have been "very happy to have had children the old fashion way," which he called "a lot easier and a lot less expensive," their family's only option was through IVF.

"Tim Walz said it best: Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their Project 2025 allies need to mind their own damn business," Chitika said. "Women are sick of Trump and Vance invading our bedrooms, bathrooms, and doctor's offices, trying to control if and when we have a child. And women will stop them this November."

And, contrary to what many Republicans may suggest, adoption is not as readily available, Wolpert said. International adoption has limits which children older couples can adopt. Domestic adoption is more "promotional," Wolpert said.

"It's really unappealing," Wolpert said. "Having been medicalized and poked and prodded, I didn't have the stomach to move on to this whole other demoralizing system."

For Harris's running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, the IVF process is a personal topic. The Minnesota governor and his wife, Gwen, used fertility treatments for seven years before they were able to become pregnant with their daughter Hope.

"This gets personal for me and my family," Walz said at a rally in Philadelphia. "When my wife and I decided to have children we spent years going through infertility treatments. And I remember praying every night for a call for good news. The pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn't worked. So this wasn't by chance that when we welcomed my daughter into the world, we named her Hope."

Like Walz, Wolpert recalls going through similar feelings, stressfully waiting for the news.

"Anybody who's gone through this process knows what that feels like and it's just awful," Wolpert said.

But he believes Walz and Harris are "legitimately committed to this."

"It's not just a political talking point," Walz said. "I think for sure they're on the right page and on the right side of history."

Swanson said that she also had to go through many cycles of IVF herself. Her daughter, who is now three, was a frozen embryo.

"When I talk about my pregnancy, it's an important part of how she came to be...Other than being an IVF baby, she's a normal kid," Swanson said. "For most people doing IVF, this is the only way for them to have a baby."

Swanson called Trump's campaign stance is "horrific," pointing to research that suggests people going through fertility treatment "have similar levels of stress as cancer patients."

"We would like to feel less stressed about it," Swanson said.

She sees her patients proactively working to "get through" IVF, use their benefits and move their embryos from "red states," due to worries about a second Trump presidential term. Swanson discusses the "Dobbs" decision weekly with patients.

Licensed psychologist Shara Brofman practices in New York but told Newsweek still sees the issues playing out there.

"People are worried about it," Broffman said. "It contributes to people having a range of feelings about their own lives and decisions they might have to make or treatments they may choose to pursue and what does that mean about them. It's hard not to take in some of the dialogue that's going on in other states."

Patients have concerns about a national impact, the overall "injustice of what goes on in other states," and other hypotheticals about potential pregnancies or moving to other states. In some cases, "family building can involve more than one state."

"Harris and Walz, I think they would be moving forward as much as they could with this issue...It is going to be our best shot at restoring some sort of reproductive health care nationally," Swanson said. "Minimally, I hope it stops some of the loss of rights."

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