There aren't many things that Americans almost universally agree on. We don’t see eye to eye on political issues, on sports, or movies or music or beer—or anything else. The newest Civiqs poll for Daily Kos, however, finds something that almost all American voters can support: in vitro fertilization, commonly referred to as IVF. Only 6% think the procedure should be illegal.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court upended Republican politics by giving the party what it long claimed to want: a ruling insisting that human life "begins at fertilization," and that, therefore, the death of excess, unimplanted fertilized eggs produced during IVF procedures constitutes an act of murder—or the "wrongful death of a minor."
In the aftermath of that ruling, most media attention has been focused on Republican attempts to weasel out of their previous hard-line insistence that life begins at fertilization by scurrying to supposedly exempt IVF providers from being prosecuted for what those lawmakers insist are acts of murder. The backpedaling isn't working, and Democrats are vowing to hang Republicans' extremist position around their necks during the 2024 election season.
And this new Civiqs poll shows why.
Here are the results on IVF’s broad legality:
A mere 6% of registered voters back the hard-right position that IVF treatments should be illegal. That's as close to a public consensus as you'll find, and it comes on an issue that the far right has insisted the American people are "divided" over. But Americans are not divided. It's not even close.
The poll went deeper on the issue, though.
A microscopic clump of cells is not equivalent to a child, say voters by better than a 2-to-1 margin. Voters do not buy that premise, and they appear to be quite miffed at conservatives for endangering fertility treatments based on it.
The poll also asked about legal protections for IVF as well.
The crosstabs of these questions are especially notable. It's not that the decades-long conservative movement for so-called “fetal personhood,” which logically means IVF should be illegal, is unpopular with some voting blocs but popular in others: It's a fringe belief across the board. Republican voters are the only group to even come close to the 50% line when asked whether IVF-created embryos should be considered children (46% think they should be)—but when you ask them whether they would support laws protecting patients and providers who destroy frozen, unused embryos, even they support those laws by better than a 2-to-1 margin, though 35% are unsure whether they support such laws.
And that’s the central problem with the Republican Party's extreme stance on when "life" supposedly begins. You can get almost (but not quite) half of Republican voters to parrot that hard-right line and say a clump of cells not even differentiated enough to have a single nerve or organ constitutes a "child."
Only 20% of Republican voters oppose legal protections for IVF patients and providers. That's the difference between an ideological stance and a real-world one: The majority of Republican voters can’t stomach the implications of their own beliefs. Not if it means losing fertility treatments.
The GOP is in very deep trouble on this one. That feels sickening to say, as the press would do better to obsess less on the horse-race implications of Republican extremism and much, much more on the dramatic ways these extremist rulings impact everyday Americans who could now be prosecuted for the "wrongful death of a minor" if the freezer in an IVF clinic fails overnight.
Americans don't want a government that would do that. Not even Trump's base of sedition-supporting xenophobic malcontents want that. But they may get it anyway, if they keep voting for Republicans.
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