Harris reacts to Trump’s “father of IVF” statement with a heavy-handed dig

On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris weighed in on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s baffling claim earlier this week that he is “the father of IVF.”

Harris was discussing reproductive rights at a rally in Wisconsin when she called out Trump’s selection of Supreme Court justices who ultimately helped end federal abortion rights, and the role her party has played in the time to threaten other forms of reproductive health care, such as in vitro fertilization.

The Democratic candidate charged that Trump has refused to “acknowledge the harm he has caused,” before playing a clip at the Trump rally expressing his support for IVF.

“Now the man calls himself ‘the father of IVF,'” Harris said with a laugh. “I mean, what does that mean?”

“He, by the way, is responsible for her being at risk in the first place,” she continued, adding, “He has no idea what he’s talking about … when it comes to women’s health care in America .”

Trump made the puzzling statement at a Georgia town hall event Thursday focused on women’s issues.

“We really are the IVF party,” she said at the event, hosted by Fox News’ Harris Faulkner. “We want fertilization, and it is all the way. And the Democrats tried to attack it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than they are, so we’re all for it,” he said.

Trump has boasted that he helped overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling that guarantees the constitutional right to abortion, by appointing three conservative justices to the United States Supreme Court. As a result, many states across the country have enacted abortion bans.

Reproductive rights advocates have warned that the demise of Roe could have consequences for access to fertility treatments in conservative states, as was the case in Alabama earlier this year. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should legally be considered “children,” prompting fertility clinics to stop IVF treatments. The state legislature passed a bill to protect IVF treatments in Alabama shortly thereafter.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokeswoman, told The New York Times in an article published Wednesday that the former president’s “IVF father” comment was not serious.

It was a “joke that President Trump made jokingly when he was enthusiastically answering a question about IVF,” he said.

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