RFK Jr’s VP Pick Is a Fervent Critic of IVF: ‘One of the Biggest Lies’ About Women’s Fertility

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Nicole Shanahan , the 38-year-old tech entrepreneur and attorney who was announced this week as presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, has expressed deep skepticism of in vitro fertilization.

Politico’s Brittany Gibson published a profile of Shanahan’s comments about women’s fertility on Thursday that featured a compilation of her comments on IVF, including this statement in a February interview with the Australian Financial Times :

Shanahan felt IVF was sold as a “saving grace” to her and her peers. The statistics show that is far from the case. Each round only works about one-third of the time for a woman under 35, with success rates falling as she ages. Shanahan began to view IVF as a “commercial endeavor” rather than a scientific one.

“It became abundantly clear that we just don’t have enough science for the things that we are telling and selling women,” she says.

She admits her opinion is unpopular, then adds: “It’s one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”

Shanahan also wrote in a 2022 essay in People Magazine : “I believe IVF is sold irresponsibly, and my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed.”

What Shanahan does support is “reproductive longevity,” which seeks to find ways to help women’s fertility last longer; women’s fertility general starts to wane around age 35, making natural conception more difficult, though not impossible. And Shanahan has poured a ton of her own money into research into the field, bemoaning the amount of funding spent on IVF, something that has been proven effective (albeit not at a 100 percent success rate):

“I try to imagine where we would be as a field if all of the money that has been invested in IVF, and all of the money that’s been invested into marketing IVF, and all of the government money that has been invested in subsidizing IVF, if just 10 percent of that went into reproductive longevity research and fundamental research, where we would be today,” Shanahan said in a webinar hosted by the Buck Institute in 2021.

At the same time, Shanahan has expressed interest in research into how exposure to sunlight might help prolong reproductive longevity in women:

But Shanahan’s opinions on IVF may have political implications. A February ruling by Alabama’s Supreme Court that frozen embryos, created for the purpose of IVF, had the same rights as children was met with an uproar, even from some conservative Republicans . After IVF clinics shut down their services out of fear of prosecution, a law was quickly passed and signed by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) to shield doctors who performed IVF services from liability.

And while it was a small-scale political development, one Alabama State House seat was flipped from Republican to Democrat after Marilyn Lands campaigned on reproductive rights and won.