Deleted Audio Reveals Plot to Repeal Tennessee IVF and Contraception Protections

"God looks abhorrently upon those who shed innocent blood. And I'm afraid that we have just codified doing that."

The morning after Gov. Bill Lee signed the Fertility Treatment and Contraceptive Protection Act into law, a group of anti-abortion leaders convened on an X Space to plan its undoing. The recording was public when it aired. It has since been deleted. TN Repro News obtained a copy.

The discussion was hosted by Conservative Christians of Tennessee and included Will Brewer, legal counsel for Tennessee Right to Life; Omar Hamada, an anti-abortion OBGYN; Paul Vaughn, an activist pardoned by Donald Trump after a federal FACE Act conviction; and Rep. Monty Fritts, who has since announced a run for governor. Rep. Gino Bulso was scheduled to join but backed out, saying he would rather speak publicly once a repeal plan is in place.

The debrief session was intended to understand how this law was passed and what can be done about it. Here are a few of the major items and themes discussed.

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‘This is the battlefield’

The conversation began with Rep. Monty Fritts (R-Kingston) joining from a Tennessee Firearms Association fundraiser at the private home of John Rich of Big & Rich. He called Gov. Bill Lee’s decision to sign the contraception and IVF protections one of the lowest blows of his time in office, adding it to earlier disagreements over gun laws and private property rights. Before hopping off, Fritts thanked the hosts for holding the discussion and left them with war imagery to keep the fight viscerally connected.

“I would just say, friends, this is the battlefield. God looks abhorrently upon those who shed innocent blood. And I'm afraid that we have just codified doing that,” said Monty Fritts, TN House Representative.

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Embryos as ‘excess waste’ in IVF

Then Will Brewer is introduced and is asked to give listeners a full lay of the land: how this law came to be, how it got through committee, and why it was signed into law after a request for veto. Brewer quite succinctly reflects on the fetal personhood decision in Alabama and details how that created a major fracture in the conservative pro-life movement across the entire country. Namely, it fractured how far the movement wanted to go in state legislatures to protect or limit IVF, knowing women across the United States want a right to fertility treatment. Politicking got trickier.

Here’s how Brewer summed it up:

“All of a sudden, people awoke to what we all know, that the fertilized is a human life. And is being discarded and disposed of in IVF clinics like aborted babies are and were in abortion facilities.”

“It really created a lot of turmoil in the conservative pro-life movement of people that wanted to advocate for IVF and all of the people out there that have their children as blessings of IVF. And certainly didn't want to lose the female demographic in an election year who strongly support IVF.”

“And so you see the U.S. Senate Republican Caucus coming out strongly in favor of IVF, you see President Trump coming out strong in favor IVF and it really created an anomaly in terms of... This is an issue that is highly technical, highly medical, and an issue people don't know a lot about, except my best friend, three doors down, had her child via IVF and that was wonderful.”

As he put it, people knew IVF as being something “wonderful,” and not as the abortion-adjacent practice pro-lifers claim it to be. He explains that for every child created by IVF, there is “excess waste.” This “excess waste,” as he calls it, is the one to two embryos that remain after a woman successfully carries a pregnancy through IVF.

The parents then have a choice to freeze those embryos to use for a future pregnancy, if they choose to have a sibling. If they don’t want more children, they can freeze them in perpetuity, discard them, or donate them. Families who create embryos through IVF should have say over their genetic tissue, but Will Brewer thinks he should, too.

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Lobbyists Leading State Strategy

Brewer continues by explaining how TN Right to Life saw this coming and what he recommends the legislature do about it next session:

“A lot of people who are waking up today, noticing that the governor signed this bill or have really been listening in the last several days, would think that nobody saw this bill coming. Well, Tennessee Right to Life and I saw this bill coming through the committee system.”

He says he did their best to attach a fetal personhood amendment (!!) to it, so they could regulate the IVF industry, but that Tennessee pro-life legislators asked him to back off so TN Right to Life didn’t become the public face of opposition to the bill.

“Obviously, that didn’t work. It flew through the Senate.”

Brewer says he’d whipped enough votes to support Governor Lee’s veto if he’d chosen to use it. But in the end, Gov. Lee signed the bill in an effort to quell more bad press.

Brewer was told by Lee’s staff that he [Gov. Bill Lee] wanted to fix this [Fertility Treatment and Contraceptive Protection Act] next year, and that he [Gov. Bill Lee] wanted to not make this “a bigger issue” than it was already going to be by vetoing it.

Here’s how Brewer, a lobbyist remind you, not an elected official, posits the plan:

“The important thing will be to have a unified voice on what that solution is. I don't want 12 good faith members coming with 12 good faith solutions to one problem. I would like a unified voice and a unified solution to this problem so that we can act swiftly to take care of this law and not have a lot of debate, not have a lot of media attention on the fractions within the conservative movement on this issue.”

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Contraception As Next Big Fight

Brewer also pointed to the contraception protections in the Act as a problem, arguing that the way the bill was originally written could have opened the door to abortion pills being classified as contraceptives. This is not a new strategy; anti-abortion folks have been working to conflate and confuse contraception and abortion for decades.

“Now I will say the way that it was originally drafted would have allowed the federal government to incorporate the abortion pill into its definition of contraceptive, and that would have immediately applied in Tennessee. So that was a small victory, but obviously the bill passed,” Brewer said.

This is false. The abortion pill is not a contraceptive.

Omar Hamada, an OBGYN and outspoken anti-abortion physician, also reinforced this conflation strategy by labeling emergency contraception as an abortifacient.

“I hate the word emergency contraception. Initially, this [Plan B] does prevent ovulation, but there is a part of it that can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg as well. So there is the potential for it, emergency contraception, to be an abortifacient, even though that’s not the primary mechanism of action. That's one thing that concerns me is the abortifacient potential of it, as little as it may be,” Hamada said.

This is false. Plan B does not prevent implantation because there is no fertilized egg.

By conflating language, the antis create space to write their own state definitions, and that’s what lets them strip rights from anything they decide is abortion-adjacent.

Here’s how Hamada paints the picture, in his own words, which ties it all together:

“We have come a long way in the past few years, just such a short few years, where abortion was basically law of the land to now, where it's basically up to the states, and many states not. So we've gone from the opposing team's goal line to like our 10-yard line. What we're fighting for now are, you know, some finer points of the whole thing.”

“Finer points of the whole thing” being access to birth control and fertility treatment. This is how the “pro-life” movement takes over the entire reproductive process.

Speaking about fertilized eggs in IVF and those eggs’ “personalities,” Hamada says:

“These are actual human beings with an actual genetic code that have been fertilized, and they are just in the very early parts of development. But as we know, once fertilization occurs, you have a baby, and the only difference between that multiple-cell organism and the organism at 90 years of age is just feeding and growth.”

In fertility treatments, he says people “get a pass” because the “babies” are too small to hold and see. The “babies” he’s referring to are the fertilized eggs in petri dishes.

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The Fertility Treatment and Contraceptive Protection Act was hailed as proof that even in Tennessee, there was bipartisan will to safeguard birth control and IVF. In fact, it was the first such legislation passed in the South, but this deleted recording makes it clear: anti-abortion folks will not stand for a shred of bodily autonomy.

This will not just be a cleanup. It will be an annihilation.