The House passed a defense authorization bill Dec. 10 without a provision to allow health care coverage of in vitro fertilization for active-duty military.
Pro-life groups cheered the provision’s removal from the bill. The original bill would have required Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “ensure that fertility-related care for a member of the uniformed services on active duty (or a dependent of such a member) shall be covered under TRICARE Prime and TRICARE Select.” Tricare does not cover IVF.
The House passed the bill (S. 1071) by a vote of 312-112, and Senate consideration is next.
Like last year, the IVF provision was eliminated from the defense authorization bill shortly before its consideration. President Donald Trump had made a campaign promise to make IVF free.
A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNA in a statement that “President Trump and Congressional Republicans have been working to lower costs and expand access to IVF.”
“The Speaker has clearly and repeatedly stated he is supportive of access to IVF when sufficient pro-life protections are in place, and he will continue to be supportive when it is done responsibly and ethically,” the spokesperson said.
Live Action President Lila Rose praised Johnson for “ensuring TRICARE was not used to subsidize this destruction of life.”
“Students for Life has opposed IVF as practiced, as it’s a business model that by design, destroys far more lives than are allowed to live and thrive,” Students for Life Vice President Kristy Hamrick told CNA in a statement responding to Speaker Mike Johnson’s move to strip the bill of IVF provisions. “The move to pull the funding for IVF will free up resources to seek better answers,” she said.
“Unquestioning financial support props up an industry known to prey on people’s hopes for a child while ending many lives. We need to seek better answers for the question of how to help people have families than to assume that IVF is the solution,” she said. “We can do better.”
The Advancing American Freedom Foundation, which is led by former Vice President Mike Pence, posted a memo on X stating “many pro-life Americans are opposed to IVF because the standard process destroys human embryos.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council reacted to news that IVF would be cut from the bill by praising Johnson, and said in a post on X: “The Speaker is right to put the pause on IVF funding in the Defense spending bill.”
“The IVF industry operates with little, if any, oversight, which has led to the creation and destruction of tens of thousands of so-called ‘excess’ embryos,” he said. “There are other pro-life options. Taxpayers’ dollars should fund fertility methods that respect human dignity, treat the underlying causes of infertility, AND are successful—like Restorative Reproductive Medicine.”