A few months ago, I sat in a clinic waiting room for a friend while she underwent an egg retrieval. She’d spent the few weeks before that giving herself hormone injections every night, skipping the wine at happy hour, getting her blood drawn before work to check her levels. She’s single, in her late 30s, and freezing her eggs now, before she’s decided exactly how she wants to become a parent. Maybe she’ll use them by herself in a few years without a partner. Maybe she’ll meet someone first and use them together. That flexibility is the entire point of doing this now; so she has options later.
I kept thinking about her, and about everyone who’s been through a retrieval, a transfer, or an IVF cycle, when the news broke last week about what Trump did to a national IVF program. Let’s dive in.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) quietly rewrote the guidance for one of its fertility grant programs, and the revision tells us everything about where the anti-abortion movement is, and always has been, headed. The Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services Program, run through HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, funds about $2 million a year to organizations that help people adopt unused embryos from IVF cycles. The new program handbook describes those embryos as “children” who already exist and are in need of a family.
This is a small change that could carry sweeping implications on reproductive rights. For years, conservatives have framed their policies as pro-family, aimed at supporting parents and encouraging more births. If you look more closely though, these policies reveal a longer-term legal strategy that could restrict abortion, IVF, and contraception all at once, and decide who gets to start a family in the first place. The concept at the center of that strategy is called “fetal personhood”, and it is already reshaping U.S. policy in ways most people haven’t clocked yet.
The new program handbook describes those embryos as “children” who already exist and are in need of a family.
IVF Is Not Just for One Kind of Family
IVF often gets framed in the press as a tool for married, heterosexual couples managing infertility, and plenty of straight couples do rely on it. That framing leaves out who else uses it. Same-sex couples, single women building families on their own terms, and people freezing eggs or embryos ahead of chemotherapy or gender-affirming care all depend on the same technology. IVF use spans the full range of how people build a family today, and that range is exactly what puts the technology at odds with a narrower, traditionalist vision of family.
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