Former President Donald Trump declared himself “the father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, while also saying he recently discovered what the decades-old procedure actually is.

When told he was being asked about in vitro fertilization, Trump said, “Oh, I want to talk about IVF. I am the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question.”

His questioner identified herself as a mother of three who has friends who are “very concerned that the abortion ban” sparked by the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade “will affect their ability to access IVF and other fertility treatments.” She asked what Trump would say to those women.

His response included a number of mischaracterizations and inaccuracies — and a comment on the actions of Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.

“So I got a call from Katie Britt, a young, just wonderfully attractive person from Alabama. She’s a senator and she called me with an “emergency” because a judge in Alabama had ruled that the IVF clinics were illegal and they had to be closed down. A judge ruled, and she said, friends of mine came up to me and they were, oh, they were so angry that I didn’t even know they were going, you know, they, they were. it’s fertilization, I didn’t know they were even involved – no one talks about it, they don’t talk about it,” Trump’s response began.

The lawsuit he was referring to was the conservative Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen embryos created through IVF are considered children under state law, meaning people could theoretically be charged with destroying embryos.

The court did not say IVF clinics were illegal or should be closed, but some clinics in the state halted treatments for fear they would face legal repercussions.

The IVF process, which dates back to 1978, involves combining sperm and eggs in a laboratory to create embryos, and then implanting one or more of the embryos into a person’s uterus. Extra embryos are often frozen and stored, but also often discarded if there are genetic abnormalities or if patients do not need to use them.

Trump said he asked Britt for more information.

“And I said: explain IVF, very IVF, very quickly. And within about two minutes I understood,” Trump said, adding that he told Britt, “We are fully in favor of IVF.”

He then portrayed himself as having sprung into action after the phone call.

“Within an hour I came out with a statement, a very strong statement with a number of experts, very strong. And we were fully in favor, the Republican Party, the entire party. The Alabama legislature was overturned a day later, which means that she was approved.”

Trump issued the statement on his social media platform Truth Social, a week after the court ruling and a day after a Republican senator and House Democrats introduced a bill to protect IVF.

Trump’s statement said that “I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples trying to have a precious baby” and that he “called on the Alabama Legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to increase its availability of IVF in Alabama.”

The Legislature passed the bill to ensure some protections, and Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed it into law on March 6 — less than three weeks after the court ruling.

Democrats have said the law would not have been necessary at all if Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court had not stripped away abortion protections in 2022, but Trump insisted at the town hall that “we are truly the party for IVF.”

“We want fertilization, and that’s totally the case. And the Democrats tried to attack it, and we’re more into IVF than they are, so we’re fully in favor of it,” he said.

Republican support for IVF is not universal; some religious conservatives oppose it.

“Hundreds of thousands of embryos – each as fully human as you or me – are created and then destroyed or frozen during IVF procedures,” Pro-Life Action League president Ann Scheidler told Politico last month, after Trump declared he was a “leader on the issue during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump, who has sought to shore up support from moderate women, was asked by NBC News in August what he would do on IVF if elected in November, and he surprised many in his campaign and party by saying: We are going to pay for that treatment under the Trump administration.”

“We are going to force the insurance company to pay,” he added.

Some budget conservatives, including Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., oppose the proposal, which Trump has not yet released in detailed form.

“I’m all for people making an individual decision about IVF. But the government has no money. There’s $2 trillion in the hole, so I’m not going to ask taxpayers to pay for it,” Paul, who has not supported Trump this year, said last month. “People get emotional about an issue, so they decide to give in completely and move beyond a position they never really supported because they’re afraid people will accuse them.”

On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign attempted to walk back some of his town hall comments — that he is the “father of IVF.”

“It was a joke President Trump made as he enthusiastically answered a question about IVF because he strongly supports widespread access to fertility treatments for women and families,” spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Harris told reporters on Wednesday that Trump’s “father of IVF” claim was “pretty bizarre.”

“What he needs to take responsibility for is that couples who are praying and hoping and working to build a family are so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been compromised,” she said.

The person considered the real ‘father of IVF’ is Robert Edwards, a British physiologist who spent almost twenty years developing the procedure. He received the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 2010 and died in 2013.