Column: Does Trump know how babies are made?

Hello, and happy Tuesday. There are 62 days until the election, and I’m starting to wonder if Donald Trump knows how babies are made.

The former president has made no secret of his pride in appointing enough conservative Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe vs. Wade in 2022, repeatedly calling the ruling “beautiful,” a brag that puts him closer to Taliban leaders than to average Americans.

But as the reality sets in of just how unpopular abortion bans are to most voters, and women begin to suffer the real and painful consequences of the Dobbs decision, Trump is now trying to slowly sidle away from the anti-abortion-no-exceptions base that made him the king of its cause. This despite being found liable for sexual abuse and changing his position literally a dozen times over the last decade.

Most recently, Trump told an NBC reporter that he thinks a Florida measure on the November ballot that would overturn a strict abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy is good because six weeks is “too short.” But then, the next day, it was bad. The man flips faster than a McDonald’s fry cook.

Also recently, he promised that if he is elected, he will ensure that IVF is covered by “government” or private insurance. Of course, that would mean covering the fertility treatment for gay and lesbian couples — and even single cat ladies who want a baby but not a man. Which no one seems to be talking about?

Except us! Let’s do it.

Anti-abortion activists rally outside the Supreme Court in 2020.

(Getty Images)

IVF for all? Really?

As the mom of an IVF baby, I am thrilled to hear a second Trump term would mean free fertility care for all, although I am also a menopausal shell-husk crone whose only value is as a servant to still-fertile women, according to vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance.

But Trump has a problem with IVF that he seems to be willfully ignorant about: It often creates extra embryos.

This is in part an insurance/cost issue of needing to get as much bang for the buck as possible with each round, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So in many cases, women end up with extra embryos — some up to five days of gestational age — in the deep freeze.

Some people keep these embryos for years. Some donate them to other people seeking to get pregnant. But many of these embryos end up being destroyed after the patient successfully builds a family.

Which is why some folks oppose the procedure. The Southern Baptist Convention in June passed a resolution “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the IVF process.”

Bottom line: IVF often leads to the destruction of embryos, which Trump’s anti-abortion base does not like. Fourteen states currently have total or near-total abortion bans, and the legal notion of “fetal personhood” is growing.

The idea that some of these states wouldn’t try — as Alabama briefly did — to outlaw or curtail IVF is naive at best.

How would Trump defend his “beautiful” Dobbs decision, while simultaneously requiring these states to allow the destruction of IVF embryos during government-funded fertility treatments?

Huh. Confusing.

The Vance view

Meanwhile, more audio of past Vance commentary has surfaced, leaving him to double down on his disturbing obsession with women who don’t have biological children.

Funny how he’s never criticized men who don’t have kids. Childless video-game playing, basement-dwelling guys obsessed with porn and Discord are apparently just fine.

Huh.

One gem catches him deriding urban residents without rugrats as “miserable” people “who can’t have kids because” they “already, you know, passed the biological period when it was possible.”

The other is a direct attack on Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who is married to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, a senior leader of a New York synagogue popular with LGBTQ+ Jews. The two married in 2018, and in a New York Times announcement, Kleinbaum described them as “not spring chickens.”

“We didn’t believe we would get this kind of love this late in our lives,” she said. Kleinbaum has two kids from a previous relationship, and Weingarten describes herself as a “mom by marriage.”

That kind of blended family, now so common in America, apparently offends Vance.

He has previously said of Weingarten that “if she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

He reasserted that sentiment last week after that audio resurfaced, claiming he didn’t care about whether she had biological children, just that she had “woke” policies.

“I just said if she wants to brainwash anybody’s kids she ought to have her own and leave mine alone,” he said.

Let’s be clear — he is talking about Weingarten’s sexuality, that her very presence as an educator legitimizes LGBTQ+ existence and is somehow a threat to his kids.

Believe them when they talk hate

The Democrats have met most of this fertility-related sputtering with an admonishment to voters not to believe Trump or Vance on anything they say. Fine, fair.

However, underlying these statements is a deep core of discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community and a misogyny that is actually frightening because it blames the ills of society on women (or at least a certain type of women, who is not happily procreating under strict Christian fundamentalist terms).

So folks, let’s not just brush off these positions as vote grabs. Let’s ask questions. Is IVF OK for LGBTQ+ families? Will insurance be required to pay if a single Black woman wants IVF? What about an immigrant transgender man?

And don’t get me started on Vance’s claims that there will be no federal abortion ban. OK, get me started. He’s playing with the word “ban,” purposefully and dishonestly.

MAGA Republicans have subtly shifted their meaning of the word. When they say “no ban,” they are saying no law that outright makes every single abortion illegal.

A “minimum standard,” however, would be just fine. Six weeks? Fifteen? Who knows. They are using semantics to hide intent.

And “no ban” does not mean no enforcement of the Comstock Act, which many MAGA folks have already stated is an existing law that needs to be enforced — meaning no pill-based abortions. And really, that law could easily be used to shut down all abortions by forbidding any item used in one — surgical gloves, gowns — from being shipped to a reproductive healthcare clinic.

So I get the political strategy of just labeling all of these Trump-Vance slips and flips as lies not worthy of discussion.

But if you don’t kick at that rock, you risk forgetting what’s under it.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Where the race between Trump and Harris stands on Labor Day, according to our polling expert
The California flip-flop: A fed-up Gavin Newsom pushes California cities on homelessness
The L.A. Times Special: A year after ‘hot labor summer,’ California Legislature chills on union demands amid budget concerns

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. Two spouses are not on the campaign trail. Two are. Huh.

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