The U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates that more than 10,000 chemicals “have been authorized or are considered generally recognized as safe for use in food, or in contact with food in the U.S.”
The chemicals include food additives, color additives and chemicals used to make additives.
An Institute of Food Technologists journal reported in 2011 that the U.S. allows 10,000 additives in human food. An estimated 66% were approved by federal agencies, such as the FDA.
“Manufacturers and a trade association made the remaining decisions without (FDA) review by concluding that the substances were generally recognized as safe,” the researchers wrote.
The lead researcher, Thomas Neltner, told Wisconsin Watch he believes the count of chemicals is now 11,000.
Using the word “ingredients,” U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Sept. 24, 2024, he heard the 10,000 statistic in testimony.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth speaks about access to in vitro fertilization on the steps of the Capitol building on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, along with other Senate Democrats holding photos of families who benefited from IVF. At right, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., holds a photo of Duckworth’s family that includes Duckworth’s children, born with the help of IVF. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom).
WASHINGTON — The closely divided U.S. Senate gridlocked Tuesday over the best way to provide nationwide protections for in vitro fertilization, despite lawmakers from both political parties maintaining they want to do so.
Republicans voted against advancing a Democratic bill that could have prevented states from enacting “harmful or unwarranted limitations” on the procedure and bolstered access for military members and veterans. Two Republicans voted with Democrats — Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.
Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Ron Johnson voted against the measure and Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin voted for it.
That came just a short time after Senate Democrats — who narrowly control the chamber — in a procedural move blocked a GOP bill from Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama that would have barred Medicaid funding from going to any state that bans IVF.
The 51-44 vote that prevented Democrats’ legislation from moving toward a final vote followed numerous floor speeches and press conferences, including by the Harris-Walz presidential campaign, that sought to elevate the issue ahead of the November elections. The measure needed 60 votes to advance.
“This is a chance for my colleagues across the aisle to put their votes where their mouths have been,” said Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the bill’s sponsor and a mom of two children born as a result of IVF. “They say they support IVF. Here you go — vote on this.”
Duckworth said the legislation would provide critical IVF services to U.S. military members and veterans, many of whom experience infertility or experience difficulty having children due to their service.
“It allows our military men and women, prior to a deployment into a combat zone, to preserve and freeze their genetic material; so that should they come home with injuries that result in them becoming infertile, they will have already preserved their genetic material so that they can, themselves, start those beautiful families they wanted,” Duckworth said.
Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris released a written statement following the vote rebuking GOP senators for blocking the bill.
“Every woman in every state must have reproductive freedom,” Harris wrote. “Yet, Republicans in Congress have once again made clear that they will not protect access to the fertility treatments many couples need to fulfill their dream of having a child.”
Republicans blocked Democrats’ bill earlier this year. But Senate leadership scheduled another vote after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump reignited the issue in August when he said his administration would mandate health insurance companies pay for IVF — a significant break with how the GOP has approached the issue.
“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said during an interview with NBC News. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”
Alabama ruling
Democrats began speaking at length about preserving access to IVF earlier this year after the Alabama state Supreme Court issued an opinion in February that frozen embryos constitute children under state law.
That ruling forced all the state’s IVF clinics to halt their work until the state legislature passed a bill providing criminal and civil protections for those clinics.
Democrats have since argued that legislating the belief life begins at conception, which is championed by most conservative Republicans, is at odds with access to IVF, which typically freezes more embryos than would be implanted.
Those frozen embryos can be preserved or discarded, depending on the patient’s wishes, the clinic’s policies and state law. Some conservatives believe that discarding shouldn’t be legal or are opposed to the process altogether.
The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, voted earlier this year to oppose IVF, writing in a resolution that couples should consider adoption and that the process “engages in dehumanizing methods for determining suitability for life.”
“We grieve alongside couples who have been diagnosed with infertility or are currently struggling to conceive, affirm their godly desire for children, and encourage them to consider the ethical implications of assisted reproductive technologies as they look to God for hope, grace, and wisdom amid suffering,” it stated.
Senate Democrats’ press for IVF protections has gone hand-in-hand with their efforts to bolster other reproductive rights, like access to birth control and abortion.
The issues could play a significant role in determining the outcome of the presidential election this November as well which political party controls the House and Senate.
Before the Senate held a vote on Democrats’ bill, Cruz asked for quick approval of an IVF bill he and Britt introduced earlier this year.
Washington state Democratic Sen. Patty Murray blocked his unanimous consent request.
During debate on that bill, Britt questioned why Democrats haven’t scheduled a recorded vote on her legislation, saying it could get the 60 votes needed to advance toward final passage.
“Today, we have an opportunity to act quickly and overwhelmingly to protect continued nationwide IVF access for loving American families,” Britt said. “Our bill is the only bill that protects IVF access while safeguarding religious liberty.”
The Britt-Cruz legislation has three co-sponsors, including Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.
Murray said the Britt-Cruz bill didn’t address what would happen in states that legislate fetal personhood, which she called “the biggest threat to IVF.”
“It is silent on whether states can demand that an embryo be treated the same as a living, breathing person,” Murray said. “Or whether parents should be allowed to have clinics dispose of unused embryos, something that is a common, necessary part of the IVF process.”
Cruz tried to pass his legislation through the unanimous consent process, which allows any one senator to ask for approval. Any one senator can then block that request from moving forward — as Murray did. There is no recorded vote as part of the UC process.
Democrats’ 64-page bill would have provided legal protections for anyone seeking fertility treatment, including IVF, and for the health care professionals providing that type of care.
It would have barred state and federal governments from “enacting harmful or unwarranted limitations or requirements” on IVF access.
The legislation would have bolstered fertility treatment coverage for members of the military and veterans, as well as their spouses, partners, or gestational surrogates.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine supports Democrats’ legislation. Chief Advocacy and Policy Officer Sean Tipton wrote in a statement released this week that Democrats’ IVF bill would “protect the rights of Americans to seek the medical services they may need to have children and ensure no healthcare provider faces legal consequences for trying to help their patients as they seek to build their families.”
“This legislation also increases access to IVF treatments for all Americans by mandating that employer-sponsored insurance plans and other public insurance plans cover fertility treatment,” Tipton wrote. “Significantly, it would ensure the federal government does right by its own employees by providing coverage for active-duty military, veterans, and civilian staff.”
Migrants wait throughout the night on May 10, 2023, in a dust storm at Gate 42, on land between the Rio Grande and the border wall, hoping they will be processed by immigration authorities before the expiration of Title 42. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM)
It seems absurd to take the time to refute the preposterous claims about immigrants made by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans in Wisconsin, including U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Sen. Ron Johnson. But the campaign of slander targeting vulnerable workers who milk our cows, pick our crops, build our roads and prop up our economy is genuinely dangerous.
Trump hit a new low when he claimed during Tuesday’s presidential debate that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Kamala Harris’ bemused reaction, laughing and shaking her head, reflected the feelings of a whole lot of viewers who were appalled to hear the former president spreading a racist internet fable from the debate stage.
This was not a one-off. Outrageous lies about immigrants are the centerpiece of Republican campaigns this year.
On Monday, as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden held a press conference to turn a single criminal case against a Venezuelan immigrant into fodder for his reelection campaign in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District.
“American citizens’ human rights are being violated. They’re being kidnapped, raped and murdered by criminal, illegal aliens, and it’s just got to stop,” Van Orden declared.
In reality, an extensive study led by Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky shows that immigrants are significantly less likely to be locked up for serious crimes than people born in the U.S. “From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” Abramitzky said.
As dairy farmer John Rosenow, who lives in Van Orden’s district, told Redman, anti-immigrant rhetoric does nothing to help farmers like him, who employ some of the immigrants performing 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. Almost all of those workers are not here legally and could be deported at any time, because Congress has failed to enact a visa program for year-round farm work.
“If there’s one thing you can do to help us [it’s to] tone down the rhetoric,” Rosenow said he told Van Orden’s staff. “They’re doing all the work, and why do we select one person that does something wrong that’s an immigrant and make it like all immigrants are like that person?” Rosenow added. “We don’t do that for Americans. We’ve got plenty of bad white people around here that do bad things, and we don’t extrapolate that to everyone else.”
But stirring up white voters with race-baiting stories about immigrants is a vote-getter, Republicans figure.
On Wednesday, Wisconsin’s Sen. Johnson joined Senate GOP colleagues in a press conference demanding immediate passage of the SAVE Act “to protect integrity in U.S. elections and ensure only U.S. citizens can vote.” Republicans are threatening to shut down the U.S. government over the non-issue of alleged voting by undocumented immigrants — something that is already a felony.
Instances of unauthorized immigrants voting are “so rare as to be statistically nonexistent,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told the Christian Science Monitor — hardly a “crisis” that merits the extreme measures Johnson and his colleagues are calling for.
For the most part, Democrats have responded to Republican alarmism about immigration by sticking to policy and brushing off the fearmongering and grotesque caricatures of immigrants. Taking the high road might be a smart political strategy, particularly for Harris, who is herself the child of immigrants and the first woman of color with a serious shot at the White House. Like Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, Harris has responded to race-baiting attacks by rising above them and encouraging Americans to do likewise, to “turn the page” on ugly, divisive politics, to embrace a big-hearted sense of ourselves as having “more in common than what divides us.” Calling out racism directly is a loser for candidates of color, political consultants advise.
At the same time, Democrats including Harris and Wisconsin’s incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin point out — correctly — that Republicans in Congress abandoned a bipartisan border security deal they’d helped negotiate because Trump told them to let it die so he could use immigration as a campaign cudgel.
It’s true that the incident shows the GOP’s lack of seriousness about tackling the U.S. immigration system they are constantly complaining about. But the border security bill also drew a lot of criticism from immigrant rights groups, particularly for the way it turns the U.S. asylum application process into a game of roulette, allowing a future administration to deny asylum protections, and changing the rules on a day to day basis when border crossings exceed a certain threshold.. Harris has pledged to sign it anyway if she’s elected.
That’s too bad, because the bill does nothing to address the issue she was charged with looking into as vice president: the root causes of mass migration. Nor will it stop people from sneaking across the border to fill jobs while employers are desperate for their labor — including on Wisconsin dairy farms.
These workers are already vulnerable to exploitation. They come here with no legal protections and work long hours for low pay doing back-breaking jobs Americans won’t take. They pay taxes through wage withholdings into social safety net programs they can never access.
To a lot of citizens they are invisible. Anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric casts them in an ugly glare, focusing resentment on people who are already living in tenuous circumstances. They are not only doing our dirty work, they are boosting the wages of U.S. workers and making our economy stronger.
The injustice of Republicans’ anti-immigrant libel, set beside immigrant contributions to the U.S. economy, is overwhelming.
Political point-scoring aside, it would be nice to see Democrats stand up more forcefully on this topic, instead of tacitly agreeing with Republicans’ false claims that immigrants are harming our country. Eric Hovde, the Republican challenging Baldwin this year in the U.S. Senate race, claims without evidence that immigrants are causing the lack of affordable housing and driving up the cost of health care. Baldwin has said she supports the bipartisan border security bill and wants to stop fentanyl from crossing the border.
What we don’t hear enough about is that the big reason migrants pour across our southern border is because employers like the farmers here in Wisconsin demand it. Without those immigrants — if, for example, Trump launched his promised “mass deportation,” sending federal agents door to door to arrest undocumented workers — our dairy industry would go belly-up overnight.
“Immigrants are driving the U.S. economic boom,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell writes in a recent column. “That is: The United States has escaped recession, hiring growth has exceeded expectation, and inflation has cooled faster than predicted — all largely because immigration has boosted the size of the U.S. labor force. Don’t just take my word for it; ask the Federal Reserve chair or Wall Street economists.”
Van Orden, in his recent press conference, acknowledged the contributions of immigrants to the dairy industry in his district, along with the construction and hospitality industries, and said that’s why he supports the H-2A visa program, which gives temporary visas to migrants to do seasonal farm work in the U.S.
But the H-2A program “means nothing to dairy farmers,” Rosenow told the Examiner, since it doesn’t apply to workers who labor year-round on dairy farms, as well as in all of the other industries Van Orden mentioned.
Instead of scapegoating, we owe hard-working immigrants a debt of gratitude. And we need to listen to employers like Rosenow, who are asking politicians to show some common decency and come up with policy solutions that acknowledge what they’ve known for decades: Our country benefits tremendously from immigrants.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in May 2023 signed legislation requiring public schools to provide free menstrual products in all restrooms used by students in grades 4-12.
The bill’s lead author said it enables transgender students to access menstrual products without having to ask for them.
Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, echoing fellow Republicans across the country, claimed that Walz signed the legislation “to force women’s feminine hygiene products to be installed in boys’ bathrooms.”
Johnson made the statement Aug. 7, 2024, the day after Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, named Walz her running mate.
Walz has signed bills that made Minnesota a refuge for youths seeking gender-affirming care, bar libraries from banning LGBTQ books and ban conversion therapy.
Twenty-one states, not including Wisconsin, require that K-12 schools provide students free pads and tampons or offer funding for schools to purchase period products, Education Week reported.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one. It has been corrected from a previous version that included the text of a different fact brief.
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