During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump cooked up a calculated fraud to target a narrow demographic: white women in their 30s.
His strategy? Promising robust protection and funding for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
“We are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump boldly declared in an NBC News interview last August. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.” He doubled down the following day, explaining his motivation: “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”
These promises resonated with a demographic that represents the vast majority of IVF users (nearly 90%) – educated white women in their 30s who often delay childbearing for career advancement and who tend to be reliable voters in suburban swing districts.
Bitler and Schmidt (27) found that infertility treatment was used much more heavily by White women and insurance mandates did not ameliorate these disparities. Seifer et al. (28) reported that in mandated states… 86.5% were performed among White women…
And guess what Trump did to his targeted demographic.
A major problem that has been identified in reproductive medicine, however, is that in the United States, access and outcomes to IVF are not equal. Black and Hispanic women are less likely than white women to access fertility care…
Removed chances of IVF, hitting the group he tricked into voting for him. His new and intentionally hypocritical executive order requests “policy recommendations” within 90 days as a delay tactic. No mandated coverage. No federal funding. No protection against state restrictions.
No IVF.
To be perfectly clear here, IVF was a targeting mechanism. Trump didn’t care about the words he used, except to navigate victims into his fraud. The GOP twice blocked the Right to IVF Act, which would have created genuine protections and coverage requirements for fertility treatments, so the delay is a failure signal.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, who sponsored the IVF legislation, called out Trump’s fraud order as “toothless” and “lip service from a known liar.”
While Trump is broadly denying young white women healthcare access, the administration also is engaged in targeted cuts. These young white women who voted for Trump, specifically because of his IVF promises, now will not only get no help with their dream of fertility treatments, they will lose all healthcare benefits as their jobs (and/or their spouses’ jobs) are aborted.
This horrible political catfishing – promising something appealing to gain support, with zero intention of following through – demonstrates the disgusting racist and mysogynist calculations of Trump. For the young white women who were victimized by him, believing their reproductive options would be cared for by “grab’em by the pussy” man, the reality is proving to be quite different than the self-centered vote they gave him.
The question now becomes whether this demographic will be able to react appropriately and hold Trump accountable, or whether new promises will once again “grab them” despite the track record of disappointment.
Related: Trump voters sooner rather than later must ask themselves, like in the Mitchell and Webb sketch, “Are we the baddies?”
