On February 16, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are "unborn children" under an 1872 state law — a decision the justices said "applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location." Several of Alabama's IVF clinics paused services within days. Families in the middle of treatment — people who had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars trying to have a baby — found out their cycles were on hold.

Nevada's legislature responded the way you'd hope a legislature would. It wrote a bill.

Senate Bill 217 would have established a statutory right to IVF in Nevada law, added protections for fertility providers, and required insurers to cover the diagnosis and treatment of infertility. It cleared the state Senate 15-5, with Republicans Lori Rogich and John Steinbeck joining every Democrat.

On June 13, 2025, Joe Lombardo vetoed it.

The reason he gave

Lombardo's veto message did not argue that IVF is wrong. It argued that the state can't afford the insurance piece:

"Without dedicated and sustainable funding this mandate is fiscally impossible considering the current posture of the state's budget, specifically in terms of Medicaid resources."

He said he supports making IVF more accessible, and encouraged agencies to find approaches that are financially sustainable.

Two problems with that.

First, the bill wasn't only a coverage mandate. It also would have written the right to IVF into Nevada statute and shielded the doctors who provide it. That part costs the state nothing. He could have signed a bill with the statutory right and asked the legislature to rework the insurance section. He vetoed the whole thing.

Second, look at what he said about Medicaid budgets three weeks later. On the day the House gave final passage to Trump's budget bill, Lombardo brushed the fight aside as "beltway talking heads" bickering and told Nevadans they should be "excited" about it. That law is projected to strip health coverage from as many as 114,000 Nevadans, and roughly 147,000 Nevadans will have to document 80 hours of work a month to keep Medicaid starting in January 2027.

He knew what it would do. Months before it passed, he had written to Congress warning that rolling back expanded Medicaid and capping federal payments would be "most detrimental for Nevada."

So the state's Medicaid budget was too tight for fertility coverage in June, and a bill blowing a hole in that same budget was something to be excited about in July.

Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, who sponsored SB 217, put it this way: "Even Donald Trump has backed efforts to expand IVF, but Lombardo is picking out-of-state extremists over protecting Nevada doctors and patients."

The record underneath the veto

Lombardo describes himself as pro-life and has generally avoided the subject as governor, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that Nevadans have already settled it at the ballot box. But his stated positions have not moved with that argument.

• He still says he would personally support a 15-week cutoff on abortion — nine weeks earlier than Nevada's current 24-week law.
• Running in 2022, he said he would support sending voters a 13-week ban as a ballot initiative. His spokeswoman explained the standard: "If the voters and the Nevada Legislature sent a bill to the governor's office, Joe has always said that he would view it through a pro-life lens."
• At a primary debate, asked whether he'd support restrictions on morning-after pills and waiting periods, he answered: "Yes, absolutely." His campaign later said he had no plans to restrict Plan B, but wouldn't say which measures he would support.
• At the October 2022 gubernatorial debate he said he'd approve mandatory waiting periods and parental notification for minors. Asked why he'd backed off the 13-week ban, his full explanation was: "I thought about it more and evaluated. Not my political position or my campaign. I just thought about it more."

Political scientist David Damore described the approach to The Nevada Independent: Lombardo "hasn't been particularly assertive on the issue, knowing that there's nothing he can do in the legislative process, and they can read the polling just as well as anybody else. He's stepped very, very cautiously around the issue."

Then a bill landed on his desk that he could do something about. He did.

Who this actually hits

IVF is not an abstraction. It is the treatment people use when they want a child and their bodies won't cooperate. It is expensive, it is not usually covered, and the families who need it are mostly ordinary people going into debt over it.

Nevada Republicans in the state Senate looked at what happened in Alabama and decided their state should not be one court ruling away from the same phone calls. Two of them voted with the Democrats to make sure of it.

The governor of their own party said no.

Nevada now has no statutory right to IVF — just the assumption that nothing will go wrong. That assumption is exactly what Alabama had. We deserve better.

Source

"'This mandate is fiscally impossible': Nevada governor vetoes IVF protections bill," Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 13, 2025. Photo: Getty Images via the Review-Journal.