Trump pledges to pay for IVF treatments in second term, or require insurance companies to cover

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump announced Thursday that his administration under a second White House term would either pay for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) or direct all insurance companies to reimburse for the process.

A reporter asked Trump about what his administration would do regarding IVF given how "political" the topic had become, to which he replied, “Well, as you know, I was always for IVF right from the beginning, as soon as we heard about it. It's fertilization. It's helping women and men and families, but it's helping women able to have a baby.”

Trump said that some couples have "great difficulty" conceiving, and many who receive IVF "have been very happy with the results."

"We're doing this because we just think it's great. And we need great children, beautiful children in our country,” Trump continued. “We actually need them, and we are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment. So, we are paying for that treatment. All Americans that get it, all Americans that need it. So we're going to be paying for that treatment, or we're going to be mandating that the insurance company pay."

This comes after the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system in February announced it would be pausing IVF treatments after a court decision that ruled frozen embryos were children. They announced in March that they would be resuming after a law was passed.

In an April statement, Trump expressed his support for IVF, saying "I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby. What could be more beautiful or better than that." He said he was pleased that Alabama’s legislature "acted very quickly" to pass legislature to preserve the availability of IVF in the state. "They really did a great and fast job."

The Biden campaign, while Joe Biden was still in the presidential race, claimed following Trump’s statement that he supported "extreme abortion bans across the country that criminalize doctors, threaten IVF, and force rape victims to give birth."