RFK Jr.’s Running Mate Has Truly Unhinged Ideas on IVF and Sunlight

While the Republican Party grapples with the realization that it’s losing elections thanks to its own extreme positions on abortion and IVF, one political candidate on the national stage has decided to go even more extreme on the issue.

Robert F. Kennedy’s vice presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, has attacked in vitro fertilization for years, and is apparently doing the heavy lifting on more extreme conservative talking points on reproductive rights while Kennedy himself remains relatively quiet.

“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 in February, referring to IVF. “It’s one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”

Shanahan’s beef with IVF reportedly began when she was turned away as a candidate for the procedure, with a clinic identifying her as a poor candidate due to a prior diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome, according to an interview she gave to The New Yorker last year.

Since then, Shanahan has invested millions into research that offers alternatives to the procedure, including funding some truly wacky ideas, like examining the “effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health.”

Between 2020 and 2021, the 38-year-old gave $7 million to the Buck Institute, a biomedical research group, for “reproductive longevity and equality” and a “healthy and livable planet,” according to financial disclosure forms obtained by Politico.

“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 Buck Institute webinar in 2021.