They’re Coming for Fertility Treatments Too
In March, Dave Rubin, a reactionary podcaster who is also openly gay made an announcement that shocked his mostly MAGA audience. Rubin and his husband were expecting two babies via surrogates. The response from his audience and other MAGA influencers was interesting to watch. While some congratulated Rubin, most were appalled by his decision to start a family. Because two men would be raising the babies. And because they used surrogacy and IVF to become parents.
The response to Rubin’s impending parenthood is worth taking a look at in light of the Roe leak. There’s been a lot of talk about how the Right will come for birth control next, but I’m not sure how many people realize that fertility treatments are also on the chopping block. Take a look at these passages from the America Conservative about Rubin’s announcement (I’m choosing not to link to the article) to see what I mean:
The podcaster [Rubin] goes on to explain that a number of eggs — 18 the first time around — were taken from this woman and split into two groups, each of which would be fertilized with one of the two men’s semen. “Some of it takes, some of it doesn’t take,” but suffice to say that quite a few zygotes — biologically distinct human beings — were created in the process.
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This is evil, plain and simple. Dave and Dave [Rubin and his husband] paid for the creation of roughly 18 unique, individual human beings, just so that two of them could be successfully implanted in rented wombs and delivered to their purchasers after a nine-month interval. The fate of the other 16 need not be spelled out.
The article doesn’t once use the term in vitro fertilization or IVF, choosing to focus on the surrogacy angle, but IVF is the procedure described above. IVF is an increasingly common treatment for infertility, and the CDC estimates that 2.1% of babies born in the US are the result of fertility treatments. Many women have undergone IVF attempting to conceive, including many women who are politically aligned with the Right Wing. I assume the author of this piece makes a point of not naming IVF for that reason.
Evangelical Christians have been against IVF for a while. The biggest issue is with embryos created during the process being discarded or destroyed. Some…
