Conservative commentator Scott Jennings was rapidly challenged for calling former President Donald Trump a “champion” for in vitro fertilization throughout a heated alternate on a CNN panel this week.
Throughout a Monday night time look on “NewsNight with Abby Phillip,” Jennings was defending the Republican presidential nominee’s stance on ladies’s reproductive rights when he described Trump’s place on the difficulty as a “very moderate, center-right, longstanding Republican position that goes back to [Ronald] Reagan.”
“He’s pro-life, he believes in some moderate limits on weeks, he believes in the three exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother,” Jennings mentioned.
“He has been a champion, a champion for IVF,” he continued earlier than Catherine Rampell, an op-ed columnist and fellow panelist, interjected.
“He has not. I’m sorry, I need to interrupt here,” Rampell mentioned.
“You don’t need to interrupt, because you’re wrong,” Jennings replied as the 2 spoke over one another.
“Look at his actual record,” Rampell later mentioned, noting Trump’s previous efforts to repeal Obamacare and the way it “got rid of all essential health benefits, all requirements for insurers to cover any sort of health care that would include IVF.”
Megan Varner through Getty Photographs
Trump has been making an attempt to place himself as a powerful advocate for IVF.
He vowed in August, with out offering particulars, that he would have insurance coverage firms or the federal authorities pay for fertility therapies. And final week, he inexplicably referred to as himself the “father of IVF” throughout a Fox Information ladies’s city corridor occasion.
However Trump has been criticized for this by his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and different Democrats resulting from his position in probably threatening reproductive well being care, together with IVF, in conservative states.
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Trump appointed Supreme Courtroom justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the constitutional proper to abortion.
Earlier this yr, the Alabama Supreme Courtroom dominated that frozen embryos ought to legally be thought-about “children,” spurring fertility clinics within the state to halt IVF therapies. The state legislature handed a invoice to guard IVF therapies in Alabama shortly after.
Throughout a rally in Wisconsin final week, Harris accused Trump, who has boasted about his position in serving to to overturn Roe v. Wade, of being “responsible” for IVF therapies “at risk” in states.
