Voters in Michigan on Friday will see the first television advertisement of the campaign cycle featuring a Democratic candidate for Congress talking about her experience using I.V.F. to start a family.
The spot provides a glimpse of how Democrats plan to make the issue of access to fertility treatments, and reproductive health care overall, central to campaigns across the country after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children.
In the ad, Jessica Swartz, an attorney who is challenging the Republican Representative Bill Huizenga in southwest Michigan, speaks directly to the camera about her struggle getting pregnant.
“We wanted to start a family more than anything,” Ms. Swartz says in the ad, which shows her sitting on a couch with her husband and flipping through their wedding photo album. “But like millions of Americans, we struggled.”
“I.V.F. was an answer to our prayers,” she adds, claiming that Mr. Huizenga “wants to roll back our freedoms.”
Ms. Swartz is running in a solidly Republican district, but the issue is expected to resonate in Michigan. In 2022, voters there passed a proposal that created a state constitutional right to reproductive freedom, including decisions “about all matters relating to pregnancy,” such as abortion and contraception. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has made the fight for abortion rights central to her political identity.
In Congress, Mr. Huizenga is a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, a nationwide abortion ban that could severely restrict I.V.F. treatments, which typically involve the creation of several embryos, only one of which is implanted while the others are frozen to allow for subsequent attempts at a successful implantation.
Since the Alabama ruling, Republicans in Congress have rushed to voice their support for in vitro fertilization treatment — even though the bill, which many of them have supported, declares that life begins at the moment of fertilization, which could severely curtail or even outlaw aspects of the procedure.
Mr. Huizenga on Wednesday did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his stance on I.V.F. or on the attacks from one of his opponents.
“My family matters — and so does yours,” Ms. Swartz says in the ad, in which she describes herself as a “pro-choice mom for Congress.”
Ms. Swartz’s campaign spent $100,000 on the ad buy, which will start on cable channels and move to broadcast.
