WASHINGTON — Senate Armed Services Committee Republicans, in a reversal, voted this week to oppose an NDAA provision that would broaden health care coverage for military families’ fertility treatments, a Democratic senator said Thursday.

“After everything our troops sacrifice for our nation, they should never have to sacrifice their dreams of building a family,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., in a statement. Duckworth has said she had both of her children with the help of in vitro fertilization.

The debate over the NDAA provision could attract attention in an election year. Anti-abortion conservatives have opposed IVF because some embryos are destroyed in the process.

Members of Congress and federal workers have had access to health care coverage for designated fertility treatments since last year.

But military families generally do not have the same coverage, except if infertility can be shown to be linked to their service.

The Defense Department’s lack of broad coverage for the treatments is a concern for many people in the service and their spouses. Infertility rates among military personnel are higher than those of comparable civilians. For some, it is a quality-of-life issue that affects whether they want to stay in the military or recommend the military as a career, surveys have shown.

Reversal of form

The Senate committee’s NDAAs in fiscal 2025 and 2026 contained provisions to authorize coverage for treatments such as in vitro fertilization for active-duty service members and their dependents under the TRICARE Prime and TRICARE Select health care plans.

In each of the last two years, the provisions were supported — in committee and on the floor — by bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate NDAAs.

But the provisions were removed from both the final fiscal 2025 and 2026 measures by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., before the conference reports were finalized, supporters of the fertility provisions have said.

The House Armed Services Committee last week adopted by voice vote an amendment to its NDAA by Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., that would once again propose expanding coverage of fertility treatments for military families.

But this week, the fiscal 2027 measure that the Senate Armed Services Committee took up departed from the pattern of the previous two years and did not include a fertility provision in the underlying bill text that the committee considered.

When Duckworth offered an amendment to put the provision in the bill, it was defeated, she said in her statement on Thursday.

She did not disclose the vote tally on her amendment. The breakdown is expected to be made public when the report accompanying the bill is published next week.

Duckworth said that, despite the GOP support for the provision in the last couple of years, “every single Republican on the committee betrayed our heroes and voted against the very same language they supported last year.”

Looming dispute

Congressional officials from both parties who briefed reporters Thursday morning on the Senate panel’s NDAA declined to say, when asked, whether the fertility provision was in the more than $1.1 trillion draft bill, which the committee approved 18-9 on Wednesday.

The officials said the details would come out when the measure is filed next week.

Absent floor amendments that would change either the House or Senate fiscal 2027 NDAAs in the coming weeks, the two measures will differ on the IVF issue going forward, setting up a possible conference dispute.

Even if the dispute is resolved in favor of Duckworth and Jacobs inside the Armed Services chambers, the provision could still be deleted again by House Republican leaders over the objections of NDAA conferees.

This year, however, conservatives have apparently begun their pushback earlier in the process than usual.

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