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Column: Ted Cruz and Katie Britt claim to be protecting IVF with a new bill. Don't believe them

Published

2 years ago

June 7, 2024

Column: Ted Cruz and Katie Britt claim to be protecting IVF with a new bill. Don't believe them

Ever since the Supreme Court upended reproductive health rights in its 2022 Dobbs decision, antiabortion activists have been trying to make the case that the decision won’t have the dire effect on women and their families that its critics foresaw.

They’ve been wrong, as has been demonstrated by the rising tide of incidents in which pregnant women have been exposed to severe injury or near-death experiences for want of a therapeutic abortion.

But the case also opened the door to legal predicaments throughout the healthcare universe — most recently via a ruling on two cases by the Alabama Supreme Court in February, effectively outlawing in-vitro fertilization in that state.

Opinion polls show that giving people a route to parenthood via IVF is immensely popular, so even conservative lawmakers have scurried to enact laws to protect the method.

Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.

— Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker, concurring in an anti-IVF decision

The most recent initiative comes from Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama, who introduced their “IVF Protection Act” on May 20 and have been touting it in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and elsewhere as a measure that “protects both life and IVF.”

Their bill does nothing of the kind. It’s a scam. More on that in a moment.

First, a brief primer on the IVF method. IVF isn’t abortion. Quite the contrary, it’s a means of creating, not terminating, a pregnancy.

But with the Supreme Court signaling via Dobbs and other recent rulings that it won’t interfere with state-level restrictions on reproductive healthcare, legislatures and courts in red states have turned their gunsights on healthcare rights of all varieties. The Alabama Supreme Court reached all the way back to an 1872 law to drive IVF out of the state.

IVF aims to help couples achieve pregnancy when medical issues prevent them from conceiving or they have concerns about heritable genetic mutations that might affect the health of their prospective offspring. Millions of Americans have employed IVF or know couples who have done so. There’s no question about its safety or its efficacy. Celebrities including the Obamas, Paris Hilton and Brooke Shields, and Republican politicians such as Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach) have used IVF to conceive.

The procedure begins with the harvesting of unfertilized eggs from a woman’s ovaries. Subsequently, they’re fertilized by sperm from the woman’s partner. A few days later, an embryo — in some cases more than one — is placed in the woman’s uterus. Within another day or two the embryo implants itself in the uterine lining and is allowed to continue gestation normally.

To understand the act of misdirection that Cruz and Britt are pulling off, let’s examine that Alabama Supreme Court decision. The decision says almost nothing about the procedure that most laypersons think is the alpha and omega of IVF — the implantation of manually fertilized embryos into the uterus. To the extent that this process needs regulation, the justices held, that should be left up to the legislature.

But of course there’s more to IVF than that. IVF clinics typically produce multiple embryos but only implant one or two at a time. The idea is to give the parents further options if an implantation fails. In roughly half of all cases, the embryos are subjected to pre-implantation genetic testing to identfy potentially troublesome mutations.

Many couples choose IVF because they’re concerned that one or both prospective parents may be carriers of a genetic mutation that could cause a serious medical condition, and they want to know ahead of time.

“If this genetic mutation is discovered in an embryo, the embryo is usually discarded,” says Joanne Rosen, an expert in public health at Johns Hopkins. She asks whether the Alabama ruling means that “genetic testing should no longer take place because you can’t discard the embryos?”

Also, the thawing and implanting of embryos itself may damage or destroy an embryo. Typically, those embryos are discarded.

The Alabama decision was concerned almost entirely with that stage of the process — specifically with the legal status of the unused or discarded embryos. The court ruled that they fell within the protection of the state’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act — largely because that antique law didn’t explicitly provide “an exception … for extrauterine children,” as Justice Jay Mitchell wrote for the court majority.

Indeed, the legal quandary that prompted Alabama’s IVF clinics to shut down after the ruling wasn’t that their right to implant embryos was now in question — it was their potential liability for the treatment of the unused embryos.

This isn’t a trivial issue. By some estimates, more than 1 million embryos are currently in cryogenic storage across the U.S. The Alabama ruling, if it percolates nationwide, “raises a huge question about what the obligations are for these frozen embryos,” Rosen said on the Johns Hopkins website. “Does this mean that they cannot be destroyed and have to be preserved into perpetuity?”

That’s what makes the Cruz/Britt measure so slippery. It purports to guarantee Americans access to in vitro fertilization by forbidding states to outlaw it, but defines IVF simply as “the practice whereby eggs are collected from ovaries and manually fertilized by sperm, for later placement inside of a uterus.”

Nothing there about how to treat the stored embryos or the legal consequences if any are injured in the process of fertilization or placement. Their proposal, moreover, says that nothing can block states from “implementing health and safety standards regarding the practice of in vitro fertilization.”

Abortion rights advocates will recognize that provision as a poisoned chalice, because even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade with its Dobbs ruling, numerous antiabortion states were imposing onerous regulations on abortion clinics in the name of “health and safety” — everything from dictating corridor widths to requiring that providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals.

These pernicious regulations are known as “TRAP laws,” for “targeted restrictions on abortion providers.” They’re “often pushed by anti-abortion politicians under the guise of ‘women’s health,’” in the words of Planned Parenthood, but their real purpose “is to shut down abortion providers and make it more difficult for people to access abortion.” In their bill, Cruz and Britt explicitly encourage more of this in relation to IVF.

One more point: The bill’s guarantee of rights even to its narrowly defined IVF is nothing like absolute. It’s tied to a state’s participation in Medicaid — states would be required to keep IVF legal as a condition of their receiving Medicaid payments.

How big a cudgel is this? In some states, almost none at all. We know this because 10 GOP-led states, mostly in the deep South, still have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost of covering the eligible residents.

In those states, an estimated 1.5 million residents fall into the “coverage gap” — their incomes are too low to be eligible for ACA subsidies, but even though they live below the federal poverty line, their incomes are too high to be eligible for Medicaid in their states.

Those states include the home states of Britt and Cruz: Alabama (174,000 in the coverage gap) and Texas (1.2 million). It’s not hard to imagine their legislators voting to turn away Medicaid services for their poorest residents in order to preserve their status as bulwarks against reproductive health rights for women and couples.

The reaction of congressional Republicans to a proposal that would actually have protected IVF providers and patients from legal peril gives the game away. That measure, the “Access to Family Building Act,” was introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who had her two children with the help of IVF.

Duckworth’s bill would have given Americans a legal right to access IVF and empowered patients and the Department of Justice to sue any state or state official who infringed that right. More to the point, it explicitly granted IVF patients “all rights regarding the use or disposition of reproductive genetic materials,” which would preempt any state from undertaking the same interference with the process endorsed by the Alabama court.

Republicans blocked Duckworth’s bill in the Senate. Asked about that on Bloomberg TV, Cruz said that her bill “seeks to back-door in broader abortion legislation.” This is just arrant claptrap. Duckworth’s measure has nothing to do with abortion; it deals explicitly and exclusively with “assisted reproductive technology” as it has been defined in federal law since 1992. Cruz’s beef with it plainly is that it is devoid of the anti-IVF loopholes that he and Britt wrote into their bill.

The cases before the Alabama Supreme Court were brought by two couples whose embryos were accidentally destroyed by an intruder at the Mobile clinic where they were frozen and stored. (Both couples had had healthy babies conceived via IVF.) The court made clear in its 8-1 decision that its rationale had nothing to do with science, and much more to do with religion.

“The theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama,” wrote Chief Justice Tom Parker in a concurring opinion, is that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

The justices adopted the doctrine of legal “personhood” beloved of the antiabortion camp. “All members of this Court,” Mitchell wrote, “agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends at death.”

As for how the 1872 law applies, the court employed the “originalist” doctrine largely crafted by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who maintained that a law must be interpreted the way its original drafters understood it to mean. Scalia is cited 10 times in the Alabama decision, but in this case the justices squeezed “originalism” until it screamed for mercy.

“Unborn children are ‘children’ under the Act,” Mitchell wrote, “without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristic.” Yet the idea that 19th century lawmakers contemplated that unborn children could survive outside the womb as were the frozen embryos, and granted them legal rights is plainly absurd. The birth of Louise Brown, the very first IVF baby, was in 1978.

The sole dissenter on the Alabama court, Greg Cook, warned that “the main opinion’s holding almost certainly ends the creation of frozen embryos through in vitro fertilization in Alabama.” His concerns were dismissed by his colleagues in the majority — his “prediction does not seem to be well-founded,” sniffed Parker. Yet the IVF centers serving the bulk of patients in the state shut down in the immediate wake of the decision.

After Gov. Kay Ivey signed a protective law in March purporting to give IVF providers legal immunity, two resumed operations, but not the Mobile clinic connected with the case. And many experts are unsure whether the new law is as effective as its sponsors claim.

That’s the legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Antiabortion agitators have signaled that they’ll use any means they can persuade religiously inclined judges to accept, even outlawing contraceptives. Granting “personhood” to cryogenically frozen embryos that can’t be seen without a microscope is just one step on the path to the legal chaos they believe works in their favor.

In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cruz and Britt shed crocodile tears over the fact that, following the Alabama decision, “confusion and misinformation has spread, inflamed by partisan commentary.” This was a majestically dishonest take. Their own bill demonstrates that “partisan commentary” had nothing to do with the confusion. The Alabama decision was its cause. Their own bill would only make things worse, and you can be sure that they know it.

Business

What soaring gas prices mean for California’s EV market

Published

4 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

What soaring gas prices mean for California’s EV market

It has been a bumpy road for the electric vehicle market as declining federal support and plateauing public interest have eaten away at sales.

But EV sellers could soon receive a boost from an unexpected source: The war in Iran is pushing up gas prices.

As Americans look to save money at the pump, more will consider switching to an electric or hybrid vehicle. Average gas prices in the U.S. have risen nearly 17% since Feb. 28 to reach $3.48 per gallon. In California, the average is $5.20 per gallon.

Electric vehicles are pricier than gasoline-powered cars and charging them isn’t cheap with current electricity prices, but sky-high gas prices can tip the scales for consumers deciding which kind of vehicle to buy next.

“We probably will see an uptick in EV adoption and particularly hybrid adoption” if gas prices stay high, said Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry Agency. “The last time we had oil prices top $100 per barrel was early 2022 and that’s when we saw EV sales really start to pick up in the U.S.”

In a 2022 AAA survey, 77% of respondents said saving money on gas was their primary motivator for purchasing an electric vehicle. That year, 25% of survey respondents said they were likely or very likely to purchase an EV.

As oil prices cooled, the number fell to16% in 2025.

In California, annual sales of new light-duty zero-emission vehicles jumped 43% in 2022, according to the state’s Energy Commission. The market share of zero-emission vehicles among all light-duty vehicles sold rose from 12% in 2021 to 19% in 2022.

“Prior to 2022, we didn’t really have EVs available when we had oil price shocks,” Abuelsamid said. “But every time we did, it coincided with a move toward more fuel-efficient vehicles.”

Dealers are anticipating a windfall.

Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Assn., predicted enthusiasm for EVs will rebound across California if oil prices don’t come down.

“If prior gasoline price spikes are any indication, you tend to see interest in more fuel-efficient vehicles,” he said.

Rising gas prices could be a lifeline for EV makers at a time when federal support for green cars has been declining.

Under President Trump, a federal $7,500 tax incentive for new electric vehicles was eliminated in September, along with a $4,000 incentive for used electric vehicles.

In California, the zero-emission vehicle share of the total new-vehicle market was 22% through the first 10 months of 2025, then dropped sharply to 12% in the last two months of the year, according to the California Auto Outlook.

Meanwhile Tesla, the most popular EV brand in the country, has grappled with an implosion of its reputation with some consumers after its chief executive, Elon Musk, became one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and helped run the controversial Department of Government Efficiency.

Over the last several months, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have pared back EV ambitions.

Other automakers, including Nissan, announced plans to stop producing their more affordable electric models.

The Trump administration has moved to roll back federal fuel economy standards and revoked California’s permission to implement a ban on new gas-powered car sales by 2035.

David Reichmuth, a researcher with the Clean Transportation program in the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the shift in production plans will affect EV availability, even if demand surges.

That could keep people from switching to cleaner vehicles regardless of higher gas prices.

“This is a transition that we need to make for both public health and to try to slow the damage from global warming, whether or not the price of gasoline is $3 or $5 or $6 a gallon,” he said.

According to Cox Automotive, new EV sales nationally were down 41% in November from a year earlier. Used EV sales were down 14% year over year that month.

To be sure, oil prices can fluctuate wildly in times of uncertainty. It will take time for consumers to decide on new purchases.

Brian Kim, who manages used car sales at Ford of Downtown LA, said he has yet to see a jump in the number of people interested in EVs, hybrids or more fuel-efficient gas-powered engines.

Still, if the price at the pump stays stuck above its current level, it could happen soon.

“Once the gas prices hit six [dollars per gallon] or more and people feel it in their pocket, maybe things will start to change,” he said.

Business

Nearly 60 gigawatts of U.S. clean power stalled, trade group finds

Published

16 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Nearly 60 gigawatts of U.S. clean power stalled, trade group finds

A total of 59 gigawatts of U.S. clean energy projects are facing delays at a time when demand for power from AI data centers is surging, according to a trade group study.

Developers are seeing an average delay of 19 months over issues such as long interconnection times, supply constraints and regulatory barriers, the American Clean Power Assn. said in a quarterly market report.

The backlog is happening despite the growing need for power on grids that are being taxed by energy-hungry data centers and increased manufacturing. The Trump administration has implemented a slew of policies to slow the build-out of solar and wind projects, including delaying approvals on federal lands.

The potential energy generation facing delays is the equivalent of 59 traditional nuclear reactors, enough to power more than 44 million homes simultaneously.

“Current policy instability is beginning to impact investor confidence and negatively impact project timelines at a time when demand is surging,” American Clean Power Chief Policy Officer JC Sandberg said in a statement.

Despite the hurdles, developers were able to bring more than 50 gigawatts of wind, solar and batteries online in 2025, accounting for more than 90% of all new power capacity in the U.S., the report found. Clean power purchase agreements declined 36% in 2025 compared with 2024, signaling that the build-out of clean power in the U.S. could be lower in the 2028 to 2030 time period, according to the report.

Chediak writes for Bloomberg.

Business

Feud between Vegas gambler and Paramount exec sparks $150-million fraud lawsuit

Published

1 day ago

March 9, 2026

Press Room

Feud between Vegas gambler and Paramount exec sparks 0-million fraud lawsuit

The high-stakes feud between Paramount Skydance President Jeff Shell and Las Vegas gambler and self-professed “fixer” Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani spilled into court on Monday.

Cipriani filed a lawsuit against Shell on claims of fraud and eight other counts, alleging that he reneged on an oral agreement to develop an English-language version of a Spanish music show that streams on Roku TV.

He is seeking $150 million in damages.

In the 67-page lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Cipriani claims that in exchange for providing “sophisticated, high-value crisis communications services, entirely without compensation” over 18 months, Shell had agreed to develop the show “Serenata De Las Estrellas,” (Star Serenade), but failed to do so. Cipriani and his wife were to be named as co-executive producers.

“This case arises from the oldest form of fraud: a powerful man took everything a less powerful man had to offer, promised to repay him, lied to him when he asked about it, and then refused to compensate him at all,” states the complaint.

Cipriani — who has producer credits on a 2020 documentary about Vegas, “Money Machine: Behind the Lies,” and the 2015 movie “Wild Card” — intended to make “Serenata” as a “lasting legacy for his mother,” Regina, saying the effort “has been the driving force and the most important thing consuming [Cipriani’s] entire life of almost sixty-five years,” according to the suit.

The show was inspired by a song that the Philadelphia-born Cipriani used to sing to his late mother when he was growing up.

The litigation is the latest twist in a simmering behind-the-scenes scandal that has left much of Hollywood slack-jawed.

For weeks, Cipriani had threatened to file a lawsuit against Shell, with the potential to derail his comeback at Paramount, three years after he lost his job as NBCUniversal’s chief executive over an inappropriate relationship with an underling.

Cipriani’s suit alleges Shell wasdesperate for help in quelling negative stories about him.

It also portrays him as someone who was indiscreet, allegedly sharing sensitive information during the period when the Ellison family, through Skydance Media, was preparing to close its deal to acquire Paramount and then was actively pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery to add to its growing entertainment and media empire.

The eventual rift between the unlikely pair began in August 2024. Patty Glaser, the high-powered entertainment litigator, convened a meeting between the two men.

During the meeting with Shell, the executive expressed to Cipriani his concern that emails and texts between him and Hadley Gamble, the CNBC anchor Shell had been involved with, would come out, saying “that would absolutely destroy me,” according to the suit.

Cipriani claims in his lawsuit Shell was facing “catastrophic personal exposure arising from his conduct toward yet another woman in the media industry,” similar to what had prompted his ouster from NBCUniversal and that he “solicited” his “crisis communications services.”

According to the suit, Cipriani was in a position to help him, having engaged in a “longstanding practice of exposing misconduct in the entertainment and media industries.”

Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani in Amazon Prime Video’s 2025 series “Cocaine Quarterback.”

(Courtesy of Prime)

A high-rolling blackjack player, Cipriani’s colorful résumé includes aiding the FBI in the arrest and conviction of USC athlete-turned global drug kingpin Owen Hanson, who was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison, and filing a RICO suit against Resorts World Las Vegas.

Leveraging his “unique media relationships and industry influence,” Cipriani said in his complaint that he provided Shell with “ongoing threat-monitoring and intelligence services,” and “took proactive steps to suppress, redirect, or neutralize” negative coverage against Shell before publication.

Cipriani said Shell expressed “effusive gratitude” to him after he planted a story about another entertainment industry figure “in order to divert media attention” away from Shell. “Thank you thank you thank you,” Shell wrote in a text to Cipriani, according to the lawsuit, which included a copy of the text.

During tense negotiations over Paramount’s streaming rights for the highly successful “South Park” franchise last summer, Shell allegedly asked to talk to Cipriani about the matter. Cipriani then “orchestrat[ed] the placement of a highly favorable news article,” that was “devastating to Shell’s and Paramount’s adversaries in the dispute,” the suit states.

After a story published in a Hollywood trade, Cipriani wrote to Shell on WhatsApp, “I’m the one that put the article out for you!!!” and “I didn’t want to tell you till it hit so you have plausible deniability.”

According to a message cited in the lawsuit, Shell responded, “I love you!!!! …Thank you Rj,” adding “I owe you dinner at least!”

Despite those boasts, Paramount ultimately paid “South Park” creators millions more than Skydance had intended. To remove obstacles from Skydance’s path to buy Paramount, the media company agreed to two blockbuster deals that include paying the “South Park” production company more than $1.25 billion to continue the cartoon — making it one of the richest deals in television history.

During the course of their relationship, Cipriani further alleges that Shell alerted him to a then-pending $7.7-billion Paramount deal for the rights to UFC fights, while Netflix “believed” it had a “handshake deal” for the same rights, according to the suit.

Cipriani disclosed in his lawsuit that he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the disclosure of material information, claiming that Shell told him that not even UFC President Dana White knew of the transaction. In a WhatsApp message cited in the lawsuit, Shell told Cipriani that the deal was “very hush, hush until we sign.”

While the gambler continued to provide his services to Shell gratis, their relationship began to sour.

Cipriani became enraged that Shell did not uphold his end of the alleged deal to help him with the TV show, viewing it as a slap to him and his mother.

In February, the pair met to resolve their growing dispute. According to the lawsuit, also in attendance was an unidentified entertainment attorney who had represented both men in separate matters.

Patty Glaser has been widely reported as having represented Shell and Cipriani. She introduced them in summer 2024, as The Times reported Saturday.

“We were presented with a draft complaint riddled with clear errors of fact and law,” Glaser said in a statement last week. “We will strongly respond.”

The February meeting did not go well.

Shell not only “refused to compensate” Cipriani, but also told him that he could not “assist” him “in obtaining a television show or other entertainment industry opportunity.”

Cipriani further alleged in his lawsuit that during their “failed summit,” Shell revealed his “disdain” for David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO, and disclosed that Paramount intended to “sweeten” its pending hostile offer for the studio to fend off Netflix prior to announcing its intention to do so publicly.

After the meeting, Cipriani stated in his complaint that Shell’s attorney privately offered Cipriani a “$150,000 personal loan” to resolve the dispute.