For Duckworth, Preserving I.V.F. Access Is Personal
The Democratic senator has long pressed to safeguard the fertility treatment she used to conceive her children, which has now been thrust into the political conversation.
Source: New York Times
When Senator Tammy Duckworth put off having children to prioritize her military career, the risk of losing her fertility because of combat injuries never crossed her mind.
But after she lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, Ms. Duckworth struggled for more than a decade with infertility — a condition her doctor suggested was tied to the many X-rays she received during treatment for her injuries — before giving birth to two daughters via in vitro fertilization. It’s an experience that prompted Ms. Duckworth, now a Democratic senator from Illinois, to draft legislation to establish a statutory right to I.V.F. access.
Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked the measure for the second time this year. The outcome was never in doubt; Democrats scheduled the election-season test vote to spotlight the G.O.P.’s opposition to abortion rights and its implications for other reproductive health care.
But for Ms. Duckworth, the effort is personal. Last month, she said at the Democratic National Convention that her initial inability to conceive was “more painful than any wound I sustained on the battlefield.” She has been speaking out about expanding access to I.V.F. treatments since long before an Alabama court ruled in February that fertilized eggs had personhood rights. While subsequent state legislation provided some legal protection, the ruling effectively criminalized parts of the I.V.F. process, which involves the freezing and discarding of embryos.
“I didn’t mean to become an advocate,” Ms. Duckworth said in an interview. “I just wanted to not have anybody else go through what I did.”
Debate around I.V.F., a treatment that involves fertilizing several eggs outside the womb and then implanting them, has created tension within the anti-abortion movement, religious communities and the Republican Party since the Alabama ruling. Former President Donald J. Trump said recently if that he were re-elected, he would force insurance companies or the federal government to cover all costs associated with the treatment, a goal for which he has provided no plan.
Even some of the most conservative Republicans, such as Senator Rick Scott of Florida, have voiced support for the treatment and cite its personal importance to their families, even as they continue to oppose Ms. Duckworth’s bill.
Like many women, Ms. Duckworth put off having children to focus on her career. A successful helicopter pilot with the U.S. Army Reserve and the Illinois National Guard, she had aspirations of one day leading a battalion, which required rising through the ranks and accruing flight hours. At the time, she said, pregnant women were not allowed to fly.
Years later at age 34, Ms. Duckworth left her command post for a staff job that would involve less flying and allow her and her husband to start their family. But just two months later, she was deployed to Iraq, where she would ultimately lose her right leg at the hip and the left one below the knee in the helicopter downing.
After more than a year in recovery and rehab, Ms. Duckworth was finally healed enough to start trying to have children again. After about a year of trying and failing, she was referred to a fertility specialist who told her that she was simply “too old” to have children, and that there were no treatments that would be viable for a woman her age.
“And I believed her,” Ms. Duckworth said. “I go, ‘Oh, I guess, you know, my chance is gone.’”
Two years later, at a round table during a women’s leadership conference, Ms. Duckworth relayed the story and said her biggest regret was not having tried to have children before it was too late. Afterward, a woman approached her and insisted that Ms. Duckworth get a second opinion from her own fertility doctor, a well-known specialist at Northwestern University who had, the woman said, “knocked up every high-ranking woman in Chicago.”
That did not mean it would be easy for Ms. Duckworth. She started with three months of hormonal medication, followed by five attempts at intrauterine insemination before eventually moving to I.V.F.
“It’s just like this loss after loss after loss of this journey,” Ms. Duckworth recalled. “Each time you think you’re going to get there and you don’t.”
Eighteen months after she started the treatments, she gave birth to her first daughter, Abigail, in November 2014. Four years later, she became the first sitting senator to give birth when she had her second daughter, Maile, who then accompanied her to the Senate floor, becoming the first newborn to attend a vote there.
The senator compared the current conversation around I.V.F. to when Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan first spoke openly in the 1970s and 1980s about their breast cancer diagnoses, breaking a taboo about a widespread issue. The more Ms. Duckworth talks about her I.V.F. experience, she said, the more people come up to her and tell her about their own.
“Nobody gets to I.V.F. without having struggled for at least a year and a half or two years,” Ms. Duckworth said. “It’s literally a long, arduous process with lots of invasive procedures and a lot of loss — a lot of grief — along the way.”
By: Maya C. Miller
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