Republicans are rushing to defend IVF. The anti-abortion movement hopes to change their minds

Anti-abortion advocates worked for five decades to topple Roe v. Wade. They’re now laying the groundwork for a yearslong fight to curb in vitro fertilization.

Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have been strategizing how to convince not just GOP officials but evangelicals broadly that they should have serious moral concerns about fertility treatments like IVF and that access to them should be curtailed.

In short, they want to re-run the Roe playbook.

They plan to appeal to evangelical denominations and their leaders to take a firm stance that IVF as practiced in the U.S. destroys human life. That, they hope, will reshape how conservative Christians — and in turn, the officials they elect — view the issue, just as it did on abortion. Ultimately, it could lead to laws that create a patchwork of IVF access in the United States, where the procedure is more accessible in liberal states and more limited in conservative ones.