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Less than two weeks after an Alabama Supreme Court decision upended in vitro fertilization in the state and prompted a national backlash, over 100 conservative congressional staff members and I.V.F. skeptics crammed into a meeting room a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. They lined the walls and spilled into the hallway, straining to hear the advice of the 25-year-old woman who would help them figure out how to respond.
Some in the room that day harbored deep moral and ethical reservations about a procedure that involved discarding human embryos. But I.V.F. was overwhelmingly popular, and many Republicans, including Donald J. Trump, were racing to denounce the Alabama ruling and embrace the procedure.
Emma Waters, then a senior research associate at the conservative Heritage Foundation, would offer another way.
“It’s important that we reframe the conversation away from just being about I.V.F. to a broader conversation about infertility,” she said at the February 2024 meeting, according to three people who were there. The key, she added, was not to oppose I.V.F. but to provide a different solution.
Over the next...