Donald Trump declared himself the “Father of IVF” to a group of women at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, making bombastic, bizarre claims about his support for the procedure as he sought to win favor with female voters ahead of the election .

The Republican presidential candidate made the completely false statement when answering a question from the audience about his position on in vitro fertilization.

“We really are the party of IVF,” Trump said. “We want fertilization and that's all, and the Democrats have tried to attack us for that, and we're even more pro-IVF than they are. So we're all for it.”

To be clear, Trump was never a staunch supporter of IVF before the backlash to the Alabama Supreme Court's February ruling that frozen embryos counted as human. (As I've written before, this ruling was the culmination of a decades-long push by right-wing abortion opponents to have the law reflect their belief that life begins at conception.) Trump even said that during Tuesday's town hall meeting, he didn't know how Procedure worked until recently. He said he asked Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama — whom he described as a “young, just incredibly attractive person” — to “explain” IVF to him in a phone call following the Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February.

“I said, 'Explain … IVF very quickly,'” Trump told Britt. “And within about two minutes I got it. I said, 'No, no, we're all for IVF.'”

Amid the fallout over the Alabama ruling, Trump has portrayed himself as a staunch supporter of IVF — to the dismay of some hardline anti-abortion activists in his party — and he has made big, unrealistic promises about expanding access to the procedure in the current political climate not withstand. In August, he told NBC News that if elected, he would make the government or insurance companies pay for IVF treatments – a claim that was met with widespread skepticism even from members of his own party about whether it would even happen.

Additionally, Republicans have long opposed fertility treatments. Trump's running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, voted against codifying federal protections for IVF in June and then skipped another Senate vote to protect access to the trial in October.