A Key Voting Bloc Is Backing the GOP Into a Corner

Last week, Megan Messerly ended up somewhere a little strange for a health care policy reporter: a religious convention. It was the Southern Baptists’ annual gathering, this year, in Indianapolis. It’s a “politically powerful denomination,” she said. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Johnson are all Southern Baptists.

Messerly reports for Politico, so you can see why she wanted to show up. She was particularly interested in a resolution church leaders were bringing forward opposing in vitro fertilization. And last Wednesday, thousands of church representatives—they call themselves messengers—put reproductive technology up to a vote. Picture a huge convention hall, filled with people with little cards in their hands that they use to vote yay or nay. And anyone can get up and speak. “It was pretty emotional. There was one man who came forward, he was from an Ohio church, and he had actually had a son through IVF,” Messerly said.

After listening to a couple of these stories, each messenger had a choice to make. The vote was overwhelmingly in support of the resolution opposing IVF, but there was some hesitation among the crowd. The people behind this resolution had anticipated a certain ambivalence. The text of this resolution builds a step-by-step case for why IVF is biblically wrong. That argument is that embryos are human beings from the moment of fertilization. Some people call this an argument for “fetal personhood.” The resolution is also nonbinding—basically, a conversation starter for Southern Baptist churches all over the country.

The expectation is that now the work of changing minds will begin. “A lot of the folks that I talked to who do have concerns about IVF see this as the beginning of another decadeslong push like there was on abortion,” Messerly said. “This is a long campaign to change hearts and minds.

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke about how—and why—evangelicals are beginning to make the case against IVF. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: The Southern Baptist Convention has not had a clear stance on IVF before now, has it?

Megan Messerly: No, they haven’t. They’ve spoken out, obviously, a lot on the abortion issue. They’ve spoken out previously on other reproductive technologies, but this is the first time they explicitly spoke out on IVF directly.

It’s interesting because I read that the theologian who proposed this statement published an anti-IVF argument in a church publication a few years back and got a lot of criticism for it.

Yeah. Both of the resolution sponsors, Albert Mohler and Andrew Walker, had been writing on IVF for quite some time. But it really is the Alabama Supreme Court decision that they said created the space for this conversation.

That Alabama Supreme Court decision took me by surprise, and right away Alabama’s Legislature was getting involved. They were intervening to offer civil and criminal immunity to IVF service providers to avoid the fertility industry totally collapsing in the state. I look at that, and I think this lawsuit was not successful by any traditional metrics. It seems like people responded right away to shut down what happened. So I’m surprised that these ethicists at the Southern Baptist Convention looked at this and thought, Now’s our time to get into it with IVF.

Totally. It’s a fair point. But at the same time, the fact that there was a conversation around IVF, it got a lot of people thinking about the implications. After the Dobbs decision came down, there were a lot of folks on the left saying, “Oh, it’s abortion today, but it’s contraception and IVF tomorrow.” And a lot of folks on the right dismissed that as fearmongering. On the other hand, there are folks on the right—conservatives, a lot of evangelical folks—who’ve been thinking about this for a long time and who said, “No, that really is where we want to go with this. We do have concerns with IVF. We do have concerns with certain forms of contraception.”

When I was in Indianapolis, I talked to this wife of a pastor from Alabama, and she was telling me that in her ladies small group, right after the decision came down, they were talking about what the implications were for IVF, talking about the ethics of it, and saying, “OK, we do believe that embryos are people, and we believe that fetuses are people, so I guess we do have concerns with IVF.”

So they were changing their minds midstream?

In real time, yeah. Saying, “I’ve been so vehemently opposed to abortion, I guess I need to be opposed to IVF as it’s commonly practiced in the U.S.”

After the Alabama Supreme Court decision that started all this, it was interesting for me to examine more closely the kinds of arguments that Christian conservatives were beginning to make about IVF. In the weeks after the decision, Mike Pence, the former vice president, wrote this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He essentially said IVF is an unregulated industry. And he went through exactly what happened in Alabama that led to this lawsuit—a random patient was able to access embryos and destroy them. And he’s like, “Listen, there’s no security here. You shouldn’t be able to touch a nitrogen tank with frozen embryos if you’re stumbling into a room in a hospital, that shouldn’t be how it works.” He also made this argument from a perspective of someone who has used fertility treatments, because he and his wife did that. It struck me that his argument kind of made sense. If you’ve touched the fertility industry, you know that it is expensive, and there will be a moment where you feel a little scammed. You know what I’m saying?

These folks believe that there’s a bipartisan argument to be made there to say, “Yes, there should be more regulations and restrictions.” And they point to the way that IVF is regulated in Europe. Many countries do have stricter regulations—not just as far as physical safety of the clinics or whatever, but also in terms of how many embryos you can create at once. They see that as a model, but they also see it as something that they think they can eventually persuade enough folks to support. Because again, like you mentioned, so many families use fertility treatments, and families have a lot of attachment to their embryos and don’t want to see them destroyed. Whether or not you’re going to say that that’s human life or what have you, there’s a lot of folks who could probably get behind there being more protections and regulations on the industry.

This Alabama case, it’s not the last case like it in which an IVF patient sues to have their embryos declared children. There was this case in Texas that got appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, and they rejected it. But in that case, a couple had signed a contract saying that if they divorced, their embryos would go to the husband. And they were divorcing, and the wife was not thrilled that her embryos were becoming the property of her ex. I can understand being in this position. I cannot understand making it into a fetal personhood argument, but I can understand the desires at play here.

Totally. Even for folks who are saying, “No, I’m not sure that these frozen embryos are people,” there’s still an argument to be made that No, I don’t want them to be randomly destroyed or No, I don’t want to get into a custody battle over my frozen embryos. It brings up a lot of interesting ethical arguments, even for folks who aren’t thinking about this in a religious life-begins-at-conception way.

More than a third of states have laws on their books saying that embryos or fetuses at some point during pregnancy are people and should have personhood protections, just as you and I do. And that poses a lot of complications, right? A lot of those laws were passed as states were passing anti-abortion laws. But what does that mean for IVF?

Let’s talk about the pressure Republicans are now facing when it comes to IVF, because polling shows that a vast majority of Americans, like 80 percent or more, support IVF. What does that mean for a Republican Party that has relied on the evangelical vote and that sees this movement in this voting bloc toward rethinking IVF?

This is the million-dollar question: How do Republican lawmakers start to shift on this issue and do they start to shift and how quickly?

So far they do not seem to be shifting. 

No, they do not seem to be shifting. In fact, they’ve largely been doubling down on their support for IVF. Republican senators last week signed a piece of paper saying, “We support IVF. We’re not trying to ban it.”

This is all 49 Senate Republicans. This is across the board.

Yeah, exactly. This is a complicated issue for them in this election cycle where Democrats are trying to say that Republicans are extreme on abortion and other reproductive health issues, whether it’s IVF or contraception. They’re in a politically tricky spot.

Republicans have been in this uncomfortable position of wanting to say that they express broad support for IVF, but saying, “No, the Democratic legislation goes too far. It’s too sweeping.” Republicans see that opposing that Democratic legislation is a way for them to, in some ways, appease the parts of their base that would like to see them be more vocal on IVF, but at the same time be able to still put out that statement saying they support IVF. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it too on IVF. But they’re being backed into a corner here.

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Is anyone holding each Republican’s feet to the fire to be like, “What do you think about fetal personhood? What do you think about regulating IVF?” Or are they running scared from this issue?

So far it’s been more the latter. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson wouldn’t say whether he thought the destruction of frozen embryos was murder.

One of the few politicians who seems to have really thought this through is former Vice President Mike Pence, because he talks about going through fertility treatment with his wife, and they actually avoided IVF, specifically because they were Catholics at the time. And they knew that the Catholic Church was not in favor of IVF. They did a much more invasive procedure where you put the sperm and the egg in the fallopian tube and hope that they figure it out, as opposed to making an embryo outside of the womb. And I can’t imagine he’s not going to be a messenger, basically saying, “Well, I did it. Anyone can.” But if you look at what he did, it’s way more invasive.

It is. It’s very invasive. There are ways around IVF, and folks I’m talking to are hoping more folks move in that direction. On the other hand, there’s a cost to that, whether it’s financial, whether it’s medical—you literally having to be out for the procedure.

If I was a Republican, I think I would want this IVF issue to just go away. But in addition to the Southern Baptist Convention stuff that we saw last week, the couples who filed that Alabama lawsuit filed another lawsuit. 

This idea that this issue isn’t going away is a good one. Republicans in this election wish that IVF would go away. They wish that abortion would go away. These are not things they want to be talking about on the campaign trail. They’re not good issues for them. And yet at the same time, abortion is something their party has been talking about for decades. IVF is something that an influential part of their base is starting to move in that direction on. So, as much as they want to avoid it, they’re not going to be able to. There are going to be cases that keep coming up, whether in Alabama or in these states that have laws on their books saying that embryos are people. There are going to be lawsuits that put those state laws to the test.