To some, “Make America Healthy Again” indicates no more than a conspiratorial science. Those who don’t discount it see it as a rhetorical opportunity.
That posture is most relevant among pro-lifers in the Republican Party, many of whom face a slow edging out by virtue of their opposition to in vitro fertilization. A tactical revamp was long overdue for the GOP, one ushered in alongside President Donald Trump. Social trends held much sway over the Democratic grip on voters in recent years, but surely, Republicans’ losses also came from their timidity.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “MAHA” is a step away from that sort of political timidity. Kennedy has been a primary aggressor on issues from food dye to vaccinations, and as such presented a framework of his own, connected to the goals of Trump. The pro-life movement — frequently timid, itself — aims to use the branding to its benefit.
Specifically, the goal is to shift Trump’s sights away from IVF and even discredit the procedure. More realistic than making IVF unthinkable, however, is to dissuade the administration from forcing taxpayer subsidies or insurance coverage of it. Thus do anti-IVF advocates proceed in making the argument for restorative reproductive medicine (RRM). It’s a treatment, rather than a superficial fix for individual fertility, and is ordered towards identifying whatever is preventing natural conception. The administration’s health efforts should reflect as much.
And so, “underlying factors” and “chronic condition” terminologies common to MAHA find their place in anti-IVF advocacy as representatives make the case to Trump. What helps is that the MAHA to RRM connection is no farce: Emphases on root causes and informed consent lead to one conclusion on IVF. The “natural” and “holistic” aspirations of MAHA — and, if not too presumptuous, its regard for human life — make RRM a logical fit.
Ideally, the anti-IVF position becomes one item in the unified “MAHA” whole. The implicit claim of the strategy is that all these issues are connected under certain identified truths, and so some just become givens.
It’s a tactic inbred to the Left’s spectrum of issues, especially to its penchant for progressive extremes. Right now, the Leftist version of the concept may have peaked: See this graphic in which activists place Palestine as “the issue that makes us realize everything is interconnected.” Free Palestine, and they free the world from “patriarchy, racism, capitalism, environmental terrorism, and settler colonialism.”
The crucial difference, of course, is that the pro-life version is not quite so obviously wrong. It’s not wrong at all — and its claims against IVF hinge on very solid and simple methods of medical diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Ultimately, it replaces the Left’s overarching requirement of faith in sexual liberation with the truth of human life.
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Opponents discredit RRM and similar pro-life-adjacent ideas as unscientific, religious ideologies. In a big way, they have succeeded, as more than half of the public supports fully legal abortion. That discrediting, combined with moral unclarity, is part of how the Republican Party has lost, and why it needs to try “earning the American people’s trust back,” per Vice President JD Vance.
At an added level, then, the pro-life movement’s pivot is consistent with the Republican Party’s broader pro-family pivot. Vance wants the administration to be “pro-family in the fullest sense of the word,” to convince the masses that most of these issues are connected by a common thread. It’s an earnest effort, and one that has a pretty good track record for the opposing side.