How Christian Conservatives Are Planning for the Next Battle, on IVF

The pivot seems clear. The Republican Party of the post-Roe era is sidelining anti-abortion activists. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint with innovative abortion bans, has been disavowed by Donald Trump. And the new party platform even promises to advance access to in vitro fertilization.

But as Trump distances himself from the anti-abortion revolution his own administration ushered in, a powerful battalion of conservative Christians has pushed ahead. In recent months, they have quietly laid the groundwork for their fight to restrict not only access to abortion but also to IVF.

They are planting seeds for their ultimate goal of ending abortion from conception, both within the Republican Party and beyond it. They face a tough political battle since their positions are largely unpopular and do not reflect majority opinion, particularly on IVF.

As they see it, their challenge spans generations, not simply a single political cycle. And their approach — including controlling regulatory language, state party platforms and the definition of when life begins — reflects an incremental strategy similar to the one activists used for decades to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade.

“I expect there will be steps backwards as well as what we are working toward, which are long strikes forward,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, who has been newly mobilizing evangelicals against IVF.

The fall of Roe itself was far from linear, he noted. “It was nearly a half century of work, a half century of frustration, a half century of setbacks as well as advances,” Mohler said. “It will be a hard uphill climb, but that’s what we are called to.”

Some of this groundwork is easy to notice. Mohler helped lead a successful campaign in June to get the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, to oppose the use of IVF for the first time, even though the procedure is widely popular among evangelical families. The vote served to redirect the abortion conversation within evangelical churches to fertility treatments, and to give ardent IVF opponents a new data point to prove to Republican politicians that their key voters could support efforts against IVF.

Other change is happening more quietly. This year, several state Republican parties added new anti-abortion language to their own platforms, even if the national party went the opposite direction. Idaho’s Republican Party added a five-word phrase — “the destruction of human embryos” — to a list of things it opposes, indicating a stand against common IVF procedures. A similar line already existed in North Carolina’s platform.

Texas Republicans added a line defining abortion as “homicide,” creating an argument for possible prosecutions for doctors who perform the procedure and women who undergo it. South Carolina added language that took aim at the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a common medication used in pregnancy terminations, including miscarriages: “We oppose the FDA and their efforts to make ‘chemical abortions’ easily obtainable and accessible.”

The national Republican platform removed a reference to “children before birth.” But the movement to advance “fetal personhood” — granting embryos rights as persons through a novel reading of the 14th Amendment — continues to press ahead.

Students for Life of America, a prominent anti-abortion group, wants increased regulation of IVF. It is working to create a legal rationale for fetal personhood in forthcoming abortion-related bills in Congress and in the states. Its strategy follows a similar one, carefully planned by activists, that led to the Mississippi abortion ban’s undoing of Roe.

Roe had blocked efforts to advance an anti-abortion argument about the 14th Amendment, said Kristi Hamrick, a longtime strategist for the group. “But Roe is gone, and we are in a new legal environment, and so it makes sense that that becomes part of our conversation,” she said.

There is also a new anti-abortion “minority report,” issued by a coalition of 19 Republican delegates to the convention, to emphasize their discontent with the party platform.

The delegates, led by Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, stressed their goals of “ending the exploitation of embryonic human beings, and above all recognizing the application of 14th Amendment protections to our developing offspring.”

Although their views did not make the main convention stage, they have an ideological ally in Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who has said he is “100% pro-life.” Even now as Vance, the vice presidential candidate, defends Trump’s backtracked positions, he has used the safety language common to anti-abortion activists, when discussing Trump’s views on mifepristone, a widely available drug used in medication abortion.

“He just wants to make sure that drugs are safe and effective before they’re out there in the market, and of course that doctors are properly controlling this stuff so that people don’t get hurt,” Vance said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

The American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs, one of the anti-abortion groups that sued the FDA to curtail distribution of mifepristone, currently does not have a position on IVF, but it is mapping out new guidance for the procedure. Although its case was recently rejected by the Supreme Court, the group started a lobbying wing in June to prepare for future advocacy campaigns.

Dr. Christina Francis, who leads the association, said the group was planning a report that would not take a position against IVF. Instead it would identify “the gaps in our ethics surrounding IVF,” she said, and suggest some “guardrails.” That rhetoric — “ethics” and “guardrails” — reflects a similar strategy that was used to eventually achieve the 2003 federal law banning dilation-and-extraction abortion procedures.

Germany, Francis pointed out, limits IVF, and she suggested that IVF procedures would ideally create one embryo, or for an older woman, possibly two.

“You’re definitely going to have the least number of ethical dilemmas if you are doing fresh transfer,” without freezing embryos, she said. “Even just having this discussion as a country, and as a profession honestly in medicine, is a good discussion to have.”

Kristen Ullman, president of the Eagle Forum, which was founded by social conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly, said that her movement could “absolutely” move forward to regulate IVF, despite the “disappointment” of the Republican position.

“The platform, it’s not legislation,” she said. And while the new Republican platform is much shorter with fewer specifics on abortion-related policy priorities, it has an upside, she added: “You can be deliberately vague.”

In the past, rejection by the Republican Party has prompted abortion opponents to double down and find new ways to gain power. After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, party leaders explicitly blamed anti-abortion activists, saying their views were out of step with a liberalizing America. But activists pushed back and used an outsider — Trump — to leverage their power, embedding themselves in his administration and his remade Republican Party.

The anti-abortion coalition knows that its ambitions would once again almost certainly be advanced by another Trump term, with government officials who share its goals and would be embedded in powerful positions.

For years before Roe was overturned, activists pursued policies at the edges, using reporting requirements and data gathering, to lay a foundation for their ultimate goals. Today, anti-abortion activists see ways to use these officials to chip away at access for the procedure and potentially fertility treatments through new regulations from federal agencies including the FDA, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“What will happen in a Trump administration is all dependent on the people that are in the administration,” Ullman said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .