Texas GOP committee considers IVF restrictions at convention: 'Maybe a later fight'

Just days after U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz co-authored a bill opposing in vitro fertilization bans, the Texas Republican Party’s platform committee narrowly rejected a proposal classifying embryos created through IVF as “human being(s)” and calling for a state law to designate their destruction as a “homicide."

The proposal, which the platform committee weighed late Wednesday night during the GOP political convention in San Antonio, signals party considerations to move further to the right on reproductive issues.

Referring to frozen embryos as “snowflake babies," the draft platform plank urged lawmakers to require any frozen embryos be "maintained by the State" until they can be thawed and implanted "by either the couples who paid to create them or by couples who are willing to adopt and implant the embryos as their own children."

“We call ourselves believers, we believe in the dignity of life,” said JR Haas, a GOP delegate from Harris County, in appealing to the religious and anti-abortion beliefs of his fellow delegates.

“Many of us don't know that a secular world has created ways to make life in a petri dish. ... We need to be raising young men and young women who are selfless enough to actually adopt and raise an embryo in their own womb,” he said.

Platform committee Chair Matt Patrick of Dallas County was quick to rebut Haas, saying, “I’ve known what (IVF) was for 45 years,” and warned that language asking for a ban on embryo destruction was too risky for the current moment.

“This is going to be maybe a future fight,” he said. “I don't think this should be a current fight.”

After a charged discussion, a slight majority of the platform committee — 17 of 31 delegates — voted against the proposed additions to the party's platform, which would have described embryos as "human being(s)" and called for the destruction of embryos to be legally classified as murder. Fourteen delegates voted in favor of the proposal, according to Patrick’s live count. The committee includes one delegate for each of the state’s Senate districts.

The group ultimately decided to readopt language from the Texas GOP’s 2022 platform expressing support for embryo adoption and condemning “embryo trafficking,” a term whose meaning is not specified in the platform.

The updated party platform won't be finalized until after Friday's vote by convention delegates, thousands of whom are expected to attend, Texas Republican Party communications director James Wesolek told the American-Statesman on Thursday. Wesolek did not answer the Statesman's question about whether the party's leadership shares the views on IVF expressed in the proposal.

IVF, an assisted reproductive technology responsible for more than 2% of U.S. births, involves combining human eggs and sperm in a laboratory and implanting the resulting embryos in a patient’s womb or freezing them for use at a later date. The first U.S. infant conceived through IVF, Elizabeth Carr, was born in 1981, three years after the first-ever IVF baby was born in England.

Texas has the third-highest number of IVF births in the country, with nearly 7,000 infants born through the assisted reproductive technology in 2021, according to the most recent data from U.S. Health and Human Services.

Not all embryos created through IVF become children; many have chromosomal or other genetic abnormalities that lead to failed implantation in a patient's womb. Roughly 48% of embryo transfers at UT Health San Antonio lead to live births in 2019, for example, according to the clinic's website.

More: How does IVF work? What to know about the process and how it landed in the courts.

Comments made during the committee's discussion Wednesday night suggest some intended the proposal to put pressure on Cruz — a sponsor of and scheduled speaker at this year's convention — to not protect the procedure.

“Here, we have a very present danger that we have a sitting U.S. senator running for reelection in the Republican party who is promoting IVF,” said Patrick Van Dohlen, a Bexar County delegate. “For us (to) take the stand that corrects him in a way that he can learn from, I think this is a very vital thing to do.”

The state GOP’s Health and Human Services platform subcommittee drafted the proposal just after Cruz and Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., on Monday introduced a bill that would cut Medicaid for states that enact IVF bans.

"IVF has given miraculous hope to millions of Americans, and it has given families across the country the gift of children," Cruz said Monday.

Cruz's bill, however, does not address fetal personhood, the contention at the heart of a recent Alabama Supreme Court case that upended IVF access in that state. The court's ruling that embryos are “extrauterine children” under wrongful death statutes led to the closure of major fertility clinics in the state before Alabama lawmakers passed a bill limiting the liability of IVF providers.

Cruz in 2016 pledged to support a federal constitutional amendment on fetal personhood, according to Georgia Right to Life's endorsement of him that year.

Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy director for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told the Statesman on Wednesday that Cruz’s bill “has no chance of passage” and would not effectively protect the right to use assisted reproductive technology.

"It's extremely limited in scope," Tipton said in a phone interview. "Nobody is seriously talking about an outright ban on IVF."

The Texas Democratic Party, which will host its political convention next week in El Paso, slammed their Republican counterparts over the proposal in an email to the Statesman on Thursday.

“Banning abortion from conception through ‘personhood’ — which Ted Cruz has long supported — is only one part of the RPT's efforts to control how, if and when Texans start a family,” Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Monique Alcala wrote.

The Texas Supreme Court is also currently considering taking up a lawsuit over IVF embryo division after a divorce — a case that could allow the court's nine conservative justices to rule on embryonic personhood. The high court has not yet decided whether to hear oral arguments in Antoun v. Antoun.

The failed IVF plank proposal reflects the desire by some GOP delegates to push the party further to the right on reproductive issues after achieving several longtime legislative goals, including passing a near-total abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that established constitutional protections for abortions.

It is also a manifestation of the party's reliance on Christian teachings to justify and explain policy positions. Speaking in support of a ban on embryo destruction, Haas suggested fertility issues originated with Adam's and Eve’s descent into sin after Eve ate a forbidden fruit, a story detailed in the Bible.

“Because of the fall in the garden … there are challenges with pregnancy and fertilization for some couples, and I'm very sensitive to that and I'm grieved by that,” Haas said, before noting he would be completing an adoption procedure by the end of the convention. “But on the other hand, I know that when we abolish abortion, there's going to be a huge demand for adoption.”

The committee's debate over the proposal also highlighted internal tensions as Patrick urged delegates to preserve public goodwill for anti-abortion initiatives, suggesting the language on IVF would “make the party look terrible.”

“I would rather see us pass a constitutional amendment to solidify the right to life than to move immediately into a new battle on a new front, which is going to piss off a lot of people and which is — which we’re going to get horrible press for,” said Patrick, the committee's chair. “It's going to make the party look terrible.”

Proposed Texas GOP platform item

Read the full language of the proposed platform item below, with the only sentence that was adopted by the platform committee highlighted in bold:

169. Preserving the dignity of Human Embryos: We support the adoption of human embryos and the banning of human embryo trafficking.

a. Human Embryos in Cryopreservation (Snowflake Babies): We call upon the Texas legislature to enact legislation that would require that all embryos in cryogenic storage in IVF laboratories in Texas be maintained by the State until such time as every embryo in said storage can be thawed and implanted by either the couples who paid to create them or by couples who are willing to adopt and implant the embryos as their own children.

b. In Vitro Fertilization: Since human life begins at fertilization, any in vitro fertilization protocol that is intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or with criminal negligence causes the death of a human being in the embryonic or other stage of development is homicide and, therefore the current provision in Texas Penal Code 19.06(3) permitting such homicide should be repealed.

More: Does Alabama embryo ruling impact in vitro fertilization in Texas? What you need to know.

Correction: This story has been updated to correctly attribute two quotes to JR Haas.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Some Texas GOP members push for embryonic personhood at convention