During consideration of a budget resolution for fiscal 2025 (Senate Concurrent Resolution 7), Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) offered an amendment to protect access to “reproductive healthcare,” including “fertility treatment services” such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).
The Senate rejected Duckworth’s amendment on February 21, 2025 by a vote of 49 to 51 (Roll Call 82). We have assigned pluses to the nays because healthcare is not the role of government, and neither abortion nor IVF is healthcare. Despite healthcare not being one of the powers enumerated to Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the term “reproductive health services” has been codified into federal law. It encompasses the life-destroying practices of IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies, through which most embryos conceived outside the womb are aborted or indefinitely frozen. If Congress, as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, holds that all people are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” then it should secure the first of those rights — the right to life — by rejecting any federal protections or support for abortion and cryo-orphaning entirely.
