Threats to IVF Are Ramping Up, New Report Says

Attacks on IVF continue to be a threat in the post-Dobbs era—and one not look further than state legislation introduced in 2026 to understand how.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know IVF—or in vitro fertilization—has long been caught in the crossfire between anti-abortionists and our reproductive rights, particularly when it comes to the anti-abortion movement’s dogged desperation to categorically label fetuses and embryos as separate, living people, as opposed to the people carrying them. Fetal personhood, which stands as the ultimate endgoal of the anti-abortion movement, directly affects IVF, however, and as Katie O’Connor, the director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, told Jezebel in June, “IVF becomes impossible if embryos are defined as human beings.” 

“Fertility care is no longer a niche healthcare issue,” further explains Danielle Melfi, CEO of RESOLVE, an infertility organization. “It has become a mainstream policy conversation. This year’s legislative sessions showed both the growing momentum behind expanding access to care and the continued challenges patients face as lawmakers debate policies that directly affect their ability to build a family.” 

RESOLVE recently released a report detailing the legislative landscape behind IVF, having tracked 181 fertility-related bills across 39 states in the last year. One of the trends it identified is that in ramping up fetal personhood efforts, anti-abortion policymakers have also—repeatedly—put IVF access at threat. Much of this is a consequence of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that found frozen embryos count as “children” in February 2024, thus leaving the GOP to grapple with whether destroying embryos counts as “murder.” (Hint: it doesn’t.) This, in turn, has emboldened the anti-IVF movement.

“While before [IVF] might have been collateral damage, now we are seeing a growing kind of political and policy movement that is anti-IVF, and that is playing out in terms of bills that we’re seeing introduced at the state level,” Melfi explained to Jezebel in an interview. An example of this is in Texas’ Republican Party, which recently updated their party platform to outright oppose IVF. Since then, Ken Paxton—who’s been running for the Senate—immediately kowtowed to this, separating from his original support for IVF. (Though given his anti-abortion track record… are we surprised?)

Another concerning trend Melfi flagged was states attempting to introduce bills requiring clinics to report how many embryos are created and discarded—thus reinforcing an era of oversight and surveillance. “We’re really seeing similar themes across women’s reproductive health care of kind of impeding on patient rights and patient privacy, and kind of the the impact of what that means to access,” she warns.

None of this, of course, has been thanks to Donald Trump—the so-called, self-titled “Father of IVF” and “fertilization president,” who’s done little more than provide some lip service claiming Americans should have access to IVF; do close to nothing about it afterwards; and allow his Department of Health and Human Services to relabel embryos as “children.” 

Melfi says the schism between a supposedly pro-IVF president and an increasingly anti-IVF movement “plays out in a complicated way at the state level.” “I think we will continue to see personhood impacts, personhood threats to IVF—and I also we will I think we will see more specifically anti-IVF bills as that small conservative minority gets increasingly loud and organized in trying to introduce these bills.”