Amid the political battle over the fate of in vitro fertilization, Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill last month to protect the procedure. But Senate Democrats blocked the bill, instead favoring their own bill led by Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
“It was an interesting situation, because you would think that Democrats would be all on board for a bill allegedly protecting in vitro fertilization,” said James Barragán, politics reporter for the Texas Tribune. “But their issue was that it didn’t go far enough.”
Cruz’s bill, co-authored with Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, would withhold Medicaid funding from states that ban IVF.
“The Democrats want to enshrine IVF as a federal right,” Barragán said. “And they claimed that this did not only not do that, but it allowed states to sort of have a loophole to cut that out. And so Democrats wanted a much more far-reaching bill than Cruz’s.”
Hear more stories from the week in Texas politics in the audio player above.
