RFK Jr.'s vice presidential pick calls IVF ‘one of the biggest lies being told about women's health’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate has been a harsh critic of in vitro fertilization, while funding alternative research on extending women’s reproductive years.

Nicole Shanahan has for years denounced IVF — calling it "one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today."

At the same time, she has also been a vocal proponent of and financial backer for unconventional research into the possibility of helping women having children into their 50s and exploring no-cost interventions to help women conceive, such as exposure to sunlight.

“I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health. I would love to fund something like that,” Shanahan said to a 2023 panel with the National Academy of Medicine, a group to which she said she had previously donated $100 million. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said Bia-Echo's donation amounted to $150,000.

The statement was met with chuckles, “Yeah, let’s do it,” she added. “I just have an intuition that could be interesting and maybe work.”

As a candidate, her criticisms of IVF have taken on heightened importance following an Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos are children, which briefly forced clinics in the states to pause operations. Republicans and Democrats — including both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — rushed to defend the procedure, which is broadly popular.

The 38-year-old’s opposition to IVF and skepticism of the fertility industry makes her an outlier in the presidential field — though she has not called for banning the procedure.

Kennedy has not weighed in on IVF access, and has made conflicting comments about abortion access. At the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy, 70, saidhe supported a ban on abortion after 15 or 21 weeks of pregnancy, but then his campaign said he misunderstood the question and does not support such a ban.

In multiple interviews, Shanahan has been public about how she feels about the IVF industry, including one as recently as this February.

“It became abundantly clear that we just don’t have enough science for the things that we are telling and selling women,” Shanahan told the Australian Financial Review. “It’s one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today," she said.

After publication of this article, the Kennedy campaign sent a statement responding to POLITICO's request for comment reaffirming her comments in the Financial Review.

"I’ve spent the past five years funding science to understand the environmental factors that impact women’s reproductive health because these have gone largely ignored," Shanahan said. "IVF is a very expensive for-profit business, and many of these clinics are owned by private equity firms that are not invested in the underlying health of women. What I care about is informed consent, and not letting corporations take advantage of us."

And in a personal essay for People Magazine in 2022, in which she detailed her split from her ex-husband and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, she said, "I believe IVF is sold irresponsibly, and in my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed.”

IVF has been used to help parents conceive for decades, and today accounts for about 2 percent of all births in the U.S. These criticisms come from “junk science,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, which has endorsed Biden.

“Reasonable people could have concerns with bioethics, or a lot of us have concerns with how a lot of science is marketed and mass produced, right?" Timmaraju said. "I'm sure there's a tiny little kernel and rationale behind all of this. But at the end of the day, IVF has been a long-established reproductive health technology, and Nicole Shanahan, bless her, is not a medical expert.”

Shanahan had a personal experience with IVF. While trying to conceive her first child, she was told she would not be a good candidate for IVF because she had polycystic ovary syndrome, according to an interview she gave to The New Yorker in 2023. Two years later, she naturally conceived her daughter. Shanahan said she was unhappy with her experience and began funding research into “reproductive longevity,” which she said is “the natural progression of the women’s rights movement.”

She questioned the financial incentives involved in fertility treatments, telling the New Yorker, “Many IVF clinics are financially incentivized to offer you egg freezing and IVF and not incentivized to offer you other fertility services.”

Shanahan, as founder and president of the Bia-Echo Foundation, is often described as the first funder and creator of women’s reproductive longevity research. In articles detailing her six-figure donations to the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, she talked about the inequalities between women and men in the reproductive space.

"Personally, I find it crazy that my reproductive organs are considered geriatric long before any other organ even begins to show the slightest decline," Shanahan said in an interview with the Marin Independent News. "I find it even crazier that we have conceded to this narrative for half of the human species."

Through her nonprofit, Shanahan contributed $5 million to the Buck Institute in 2020 for “reproductive longevity and equality,” followed by an additional $2 million in 2021 for a “healthy and livable planet,” according to financial disclosure forms filed by the foundation.

“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.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated how much Shanahan's group had donated to the National Academy of Medicine.