"We Will Not Be Deterred”: Advocates Push Back After Secret Audio on IVF, Contraception

Read the full article from TN Repro News

Quick Deleted Audio Recap

On Sept. 8, TN Repro News published exclusive deleted audio of an X Space call hosted by Conservative Christians of Tennessee.

Will Brewer of Tennessee Right to Life, anti-abortion OBGYN Omar Hamada, FACE Act violator Paul Vaughn, and Rep. Monty Fritts, now running for governor, were among the speakers. They argued the new law could be undone because of how “contraception” was defined, warning it opened the door to “excess” disposal of embryos in IVF. The call showed leaders plotting to repeal the Fertility Treatment and Contraception Protection Act, targeting both IVF and modern birth control.

AWAKE Tennessee: “We Will Not Be Deterred”

AWAKE Tennessee said the recordings confirm what they expected.

Here’s what AWAKE’s Executive Director Kelli Nowers told TN Repro News:

“These recordings only affirm what we anticipated since the last legislative session adjourned. The team at AWAKE, along with other statewide advocates, has been preparing for the inevitability that extremist lawmakers would respond negatively to our success in passing the Fertility Care and Contraceptive Protection Act last year. It was clear after 11 House Republicans appealed to Governor Lee to veto the legislation protecting access to birth control and fertility care that they would continue efforts to restrict reproductive health care.

AWAKE will not be deterred. We will continue to confront misinformation and fear-mongering with facts, data, and, most importantly, the lived experiences of Tennessee women and pregnant people. Tennesseans deserve the freedom to make personal decisions about their health and families without political interference, and we will fight to ensure those rights remain protected.”

IVF Patient: “They’re Playing Chess with Our Families”

For Kerri Brewer of Marion County, the threat is personal. She and her husband had their now two-year-old son via IVF. She’s appalled by the right’s obsession with calling embryos babies.

“It makes me laugh. A ninety-year-old can’t survive in a freezer,” she argued.

Last month, she watched the Marion County Republican Party’s livestream where Greater Chattanooga Right to Life President Candy Clepper doubled down on their commitment to undo the fertility treatment protections. Kerri Brewer (not related to Will Brewer) said she was incensed. She stepped out of her home during the livestream to take action.

“I didn't do anything aggressive. But I got some yellow poster board and a Sharpie and wrote, ‘Embryos are not babies, hands off IVF and women's bodies.’ And I just set them right outside the building so they'd see it when they left.”

She can’t stomach what lobbyists are doing to families. She tells me what she sees every day in the private fertility groups she’s in:

“I hate when I see these women who come from very conservative religious families getting grief from their families because they see these [anti-IVF] groups and politicians saying, ‘Oh, IVF murders babies and IVF is genetic selection.’ These people just assume that these [anti-IVF] people are right, and they tell their family members, well, ‘It's just God's will, you’re infertile, and if you do that [IVF], that’s of the devil, that’s evil. You’re a baby murderer.’ And the guilt of these women — they’re already struggling, and they’re not getting to have a family. Then to be guilted by your family or your church, who is not taking a scientific approach, that’s just sad.”

“I don't think women, men, and families deserve that.”

She remembers crying when the law passed:
“I was crying when the protection bill passed. But I immediately had concerns — why did they switch so fast? I’m celebrating, but my guard is up.”

Planned Parenthood: “They Tend to Hide the Ball”

Ashley Coffield, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, said the recordings echo a familiar playbook.

“We are learning, once again, the really tough lesson of working with a supermajority. When you do find common ground across the aisle and agreement on things, it's the voices that are farthest to the right who win in the long term because they don't need to reach across the aisle to find common ground. In the long term, the supermajority can do whatever it wants, and the voices furthest to the right have the last say at the end of the day,” she said.

While current anti-abortion legislators seem extreme, more fringe voices are waiting for a spot in the limelight.

“Many of the members of the supermajority are afraid of challenges from someone even further right within their gerrymandered districts. It [TN' Right to Life ownership’s of the TN legislature] operates as a veiled threat: that [they] would find somebody to primary them who would be much more hardcore about reproductive health,” Coffield said. “As if they're not already hardcore about it, right? But somebody who will go along with Tennessee Right to Life's agenda.”

Those voices, she told TN Repro News, go much further back.

Recalling TN Right to Life’s 2014 campaign to add abortion restrictions to the Tennessee Constitution, she said they’ll do whatever they please regardless of truth:

“What they [TN Right to Life] said to the public on the one hand was different from what they actually did. They tend to hide the ball.”

She also warned that IVF restrictions are part of a long-term plan.

In 2022, ProPublica revealed secret audio outlining their plot to restrict fertility access after the abortion debate calmed down.

Planned Parenthood has a plan. They will continue their Capitol Lobby Days, hold educational training for advocates, and bring new voices to speak with legislators.

“What we're doing is influencing activists and organizers to make a difference on the ground so that we can start bringing some common sense to local elections. We’re getting more people registered to vote, getting more to turn out to vote, getting more people to understand what's at stake, and getting more to feel less disempowered and disenchanted and more activated,” Coffield said.

“You have to experience what's happening, and you have to have some hope that you can change it at the local level. We’re going to continue to provide that hope. We're going to continue to be hope dealers.”

What Comes Next

Together, AWAKE, IVF advocates like Kerri Brewer, and Planned Parenthood advocates point to the same conclusion: the protections Tennesseans celebrated this summer are under threat. It was apparent as the law passed and even more so the day after, when this recording was made (and has since been deleted, until now.

Still, no one is giving up.

“It’s really about Tennesseans being able to have nice things. When people can compromise and come together and find common ground. That we’ve lost that in Tennessee,” Coffield said. “It’s not about turning Tennessee into something it’s not. “We can find places where everybody gets a little bit of something important to them rather than having it be so extreme and polarized. So we’ll continue — that is where Planned Parenthood continues to sit in that space.”

Read the original reporting and hear the deleted audio here.