Weber State University recruiter Kate Turner has been weighing whether to quit her stable job at one of Utah’s public colleges to become a part-time barista at Starbucks, she told lawmakers earlier this week.
After three years of unsuccessfully trying to have a baby, she and her husband have decided to try in vitro fertilization — but Turner’s state-government provided insurance doesn’t cover the procedure, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. A health plan for employees at the international coffee chain does.
“I’m maybe one of the hardcore guys up here when it comes to bills that affect insurance rates. Generally, I vote against quite a lot of them,” said state Sen. Calvin Musselman, R-West Haven.
But when Turner shared her predicament with him, Musselman reconsidered his position and decided to pitch his colleagues on expanding Utah’s infertility treatment coverage pilot program — which allows public workers to access a $4,000 benefit toward assisted reproductive technologies — to provide complete coverage of infertility treatments.
The bill received unanimous support from state lawmakers, including in their final vote on the proposal Thursday. Once Gov. Spencer Cox adds his expected signature to the bill, full IVF coverage will be provided under the Public Employees Health Program, or PEHP, starting in July.
As the legislation was presented to lawmakers, several tearfully shared their own struggles with infertility in declaring their support for widening coverage for employees trying to become pregnant.
Freshman Rep. Jason Thompson, R-River Heights, said in a committee hearing that while he was attending Brigham Young University, he and his wife would ride a bus from Provo to the Reproductive Care Center in Sandy.
“We went through every type of fertility treatment you could go through,” Thompson told fellow House Government Operations Committee members. He said he ended up selling books door-to-door to pay for IVF. The Thompsons conceived three of their six children through IVF.
“There’s no greater hell that we went through as a young married couple than not understanding why we couldn’t have children and not being able to afford to do it,” Thompson said in a Monday committee meeting, adding, “I can’t think of something more kind that we can do for our public employees.”
Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Herriman, was the House sponsor when Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla pushed to expand the 2018 pilot program four years ago — before Pierucci knew that her family would need to use infertility treatments, she said.
“As someone who also is so grateful for this medical advancement so that I could have my little girl ... I am rising in support of this today,” Pierucci said, “knowing that my emotions might not get in check, because there were a lot of families who reached out, who feel like they are not seen, and people don’t understand it. But we do understand it, and we are a pro-family state, and we do want to make it possible for them to expand their home.”
‘A little bit torn’
The supermajority Republican Legislature’s vote comes nearly a year after the Utah Republican Party blocked an attempt to amend its platform to call for laws banning IVF, and a resolution encouraging lawmakers to pass a bill to that end.
Nearly three years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — the 50-year-old precedent that protected abortion as a constitutional right — and left reproductive health policymaking to states, some conservatives have moved on to advocating for restrictions on IVF.
Most of the attacks on it center around extra embryos produced during the process, which are often frozen for future use. Sometimes those embryos are given to other couples hoping to start or grow families, or they are donated to an academic research institution. Some choose to discard their embryos.
In Utah, which currently bars abortion after 18 weeks while a near-total ban makes its way through the courts, such criticism has gained little ground. But as Musselman’s bill made its way through the Legislature, a few GOP lawmakers expressed sympathy for those perspectives.
“IVF is controversial,” Rep. Cory Maloy, R-Lehi, said in a committee hearing, continuing, “A lot of people feel like there’s moral implications here related to, what about all of the extra eggs and everything? And I don’t pretend to understand all of it, but I hear these things, and sometimes it makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, I do know of people who have greatly benefited from IVF. ... So I am a little bit torn between those two things.”
Musselman, who voted against earlier efforts for public employee insurance to cover IVF and has stood alongside the majority of his Republican colleagues in seeking a complete abortion ban, said members of the public who came to hearings in opposition to IVF “do so in love,” but dismissed their arguments.
“The intent of these individuals in this circumstance is to bring life into the world. That’s the intent — that’s really, irrefutable. You can’t argue that," Musselman said. “And I know this is touchy, but on the other side, the intent of an individual that is pregnant that wants to abort, their intent is to end that pregnancy. They are opposing worlds.”
Utah is an outlier among Republican states when it comes to the rate at which residents turn to assisted reproductive technologies to grow their families.
According to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 2.9 of every 100 babies born in Utah is conceived through those technologies — the highest percentage among states that President Donald Trump won in November.
A number of primarily Democratic states have gone further with policies that expand access to IVF, including passing laws mandating all employers provide insurance that covers the treatment.
