By Ben Johnson

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A tongue-tied candidate whose radical views would make them unelectable hides from the media until the election is over, emerging only to launch fact-free attacks that his (or her) political opponent is the real extremist.

The past is prologue, as Kamala Harris has chosen Joe Biden’s 2020 basement-bound election strategy as her “new way forward.” Unlike Joe, she’s hiding in plain sight — conducting rallies, giving the same speech, and occasionally repeating the same canned lines over and over without taking probing questions. But she has expanded Biden’s strategy in one way: In addition to attacking former President Donald Trump as a racist, sexist, threat to democracy, she has relaunched the Democrats’ threadbare “War on Women.”

The most recent battle came as the Senate rejected the so-called “Right to IVF” act. That “right” itself is conspicuously absent from the U.S. Constitution — but in modern parlance, anything a liberal voter wants is a “right,” and anything a Republican voter wants is a hate crime. Yet both parties have decided to embrace IVF, with Trump promising to force taxpayers to fund it directly through taxation or indirectly through higher insurance premiums.

To provoke a conflict, Senate Democrats rolled multiple reproductive-related measures together into a 63-page bill festooned with more poison pills than Hitler’s inner circle on V-E Day. The bill essentially keeps the underregulated industry an outpost of the ethical Wild West, just as technological development pushes it into the most dangerous ethical arenas. As one professor explained, new IVF technology raises consequential moral questions:

“This technology would allow same-sex couples to have children who are biologically related to both of them; allow single individuals to procreate without the genetic contribution of another individual; and facilitate ‘multiplex’ parenting, where groups of more than two individuals procreate together, producing children who are the genetic progeny of them all.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins put it more simply: The bill “was more of a schematic for Frankenstein,” he quipped. “This is not what it appeared to be.”

“It would also take away all conscience protections for anyone across the country dealing with this issue, no matter how it’s done or what is done,” said Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday. “Every single Democrat voted today for human cloning, for three parent families,” said Lankford. That inhuman experimentation is “the kind of stuff that communist China does.”

Thankfully, this controversial bill stalled in the Senate. It needed 60 votes to break the filibuster but only got 51. Two of the usual Republican suspects — Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins — crossed the aisle to vote with Senate Democrats to advance this anti-life bill. Perkins congratulated even those “weak” Republicans who stood against the bill.

This show vote intended to serve up a messaging bill proving evil conservatives want to take away IVF from families who put off having children during their peak fertile years, often because they are strained by … exactly the kinds of economic policies Kamala Harris enacted. Lankford explained, “This is truly a really bad bill that they’re going to just throw out there and to be able to say, ‘Okay, Trump is saying one thing about IVF, but all the Republicans voting against it are secretly against IVF,’” which he called “absurd.” But “if Americans aren’t paying attention, and they don’t read the details of what these bills actually say, then they’ll miss it based on a headline.”

Right on cue, Democrats spoke as if reading off Lankford’s script. “Donald Trump and Republicans love to say they’re going to protect IVF. But Senate Republicans have blocked IVF protections not once, but TWICE now,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “Women are not stupid. We know that this has always been about controlling women’s bodies. And we’re fighting back.”

Kamala Harris added another layer to the War on Women narrative. “Congressional Republicans’ repeated refusal to protect access to IVF is not an isolated incident,” said Harris (or whoever writes her press releases). “They have also blocked legislation to protect the right to contraception.” She’s referring to the so-called “Right to Contraception” Act (S. 1999), a bill laden with sloppy language that a judicial activist would have interpreted to legalize abortion pills and transgender surgeries in all 50 states. It also superseded other legislation, “including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993” and legally confused sex with “gender identity and sexual orientation.”

Harris said forcing Christians to carry out abortions and transgender surgeries is an expression of “woman’s freedom” and opposing it “is extreme, dangerous, and wrong. … And we continue to call on Congress to finally pass a bill that restores reproductive freedom.” The term “reproductive freedom” has morphed from the right to kill an unborn child to any of the (usually taxpayer-funded) activities that line the pockets of Planned Parenthood (which, in turn, line Harris’s pockets).

Voters should note the pervasive dishonesty, the — to coin a term — misinformation suffusing the Left’s IVF-under-siege narrative. IVF faces no threat. In fact, it receives glowing endorsements from both parties when the underlying procedure should raise ethical alarms for treating women like incubators, separating children from their parents, and discarding the vast majority of children conceived.

IVF’s Moral Hazards

IVF begins by harvesting between 10 and a dozen eggs, but only eight ova will be successfully fertilized into newly conceived children. Once fertilized, between 50% and 70% of those embryos will die between day three and day five or six, leaving only three or four which reach the blastocyst stage and can be transferred to the womb. After implantation, the gestational mother’s body may still reject the donor’s embryo (or her own), bringing her child’s life to an end. Women over 40 who have a child successfully implanted in their womb by IVF have a 30% to 50% chance of miscarriage. That is, in all, IVF is remarkably unsuccessful. According to Penn Medicine, “the likelihood of having a full term, normal birth weight and singleton live birth per cycle” is 17% for women aged 35-37, and falls rapidly every other year until it reaches 0.6% for women over the age of 44.

In all, “93% of the embryos created through IVF never result in a live birth,” according to Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council.

“IVF can be mentally, physically and emotionally painful,” reported The Washington Post.

The coverage may give the impression IVF is more common than it is. About 85,000 babies were born by IVF in 2021 — or about 2.3% of all American babies, according to HHS. IVF has conceived one million babies total in the 28 years between 1987 and 2015. Instead, treat the root causes of infertility.

The relatively rare and demanding nature of the work leaves its practitioners well-compensated. IVF costs $10,000 to $25,000 a cycle. But one study found only one-third of women could conceive after three cycles. About two-thirds of all IVF patients need six cycles of IVF treatment to get pregnant. (One out of three women cannot get pregnant even then.) The full cost can range from $60,000 to more than $150,000, not including the costs of additional genetic testing. Both parties seek to shift this cost to taxpayers.

The greater cost is the one placed on the natural institution of the family. Surrogacy, which often accompanies IVF, turns children into commodities and deliberately separates a child from one, both (or potentially all three) of his or her parents. The pre-political relationship between a mother and her child should never be commercialized. Transforming children into consumer goods weakens the most precious bonds. The Scriptures ask, “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee” (Isaiah 49:15). Aside from the impending experimentation, IVF also opens the door to screening — and possibly genetically manipulating — embryos for physical or mental “deficiencies,” or preferred physical traits ranging from sex selection to eye color.

The worst cost is the toll in innocent human life. The remainder of the eggs harvested and fertilized into newly conceived children remain in storage, where they are usually abandoned, by the tens of thousands. They remain frozen indefinitely — unless their parents “discard” them, possibly ending three of their children’s lives to bring one into the world.

Democrats have tried to outshine Trump in their support for in vitro fertilization, with Michelle Obama claiming she conceived using the controversial fertility treatment, and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz inventing a fertility history in which his wife got pregnant via IVF. But both parties should step back and reconsider their embrace.

Life deserves to be preserved. By both parties.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.