We should be wary of throwing tax dollars at an industry that commodifies babies and bodies and is rife with risk.
We should be wary of throwing tax dollars at an industry that commodifies babies and bodies and is rife with risk.
D oes America need government-funded in vitro fertilization (IVF)?
President Trump first waded into the issue of IVF on the campaign trail when the Alabama supreme court upheld a couple’s wrongful death claims against an IVF clinic that accidentally destroyed their frozen embryos. The ruling was construed by some as granting personhood status to embryos and thereby jeopardizing the entire industry, which creates hundreds of thousands of embryos each year that are destined for the freezer or the trash.
The abortion movement, in overdrive since the fall of Roe v. Wade, pounced. One media outlet called the ruling a “political gift” for Democrats, who had been working to squeeze every last drop out of their now failed narrative that the Right wants to take away choices and rights from women. Attempting to get ahead of a runaway train, Trump responded by promising to throw his weight behind IVF. Tossing in a pro-natalist spin, he added, “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”
Fast-forward to this week. “PROMISES MADE. PROMISES KEPT: President Trump just signed an Executive Order to Expand Access to IVF!” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X.
We certainly do want more babies. Our demographic death spiral needs to break before it’s too late, and we want to create a culture where children are welcomed as a gift and not a burden. Moreover, countless couples in America are struggling with the pain of infertility, a growing crisis for reasons we don’t yet fully understand, and they deserve the concern and attention of policymakers.
But many Republican policymakers who have been steadfast in their dedication to the pro-life cause don’t seem to understand IVF is an industry that internationally recognized expert in law and bioethics O. Carter Snead and the executive director of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, Yuval Levin, recently categorized as “fraught with serious peril.” Even many pro-lifers and faith leaders don’t fully grasp its hazards. As one practicing Catholic recently asked me, “What, exactly, does IVF entail?”
It entails first and foremost, the almost inevitable destruction of innocent human life. For every baby produced through IVF, there are typically many more that are destroyed, discarded, or turned into lab material for scientists. Others are condemned to the cold limbo of the freezer, where somewhere between 600,000 and a million embryos today await their fate.
The near total lack of regulation on the industry has earned it the label “the Wild Wild West,” where men get away with fathering hundreds of children anonymously, where half-siblings are unknowingly marrying or sleeping with each other, and where embryos are being accidentally swapped and implanted into the wrong uteruses.
There is basically no oversight or research about the long-term health effects on the women who must endure the extreme doses of hormones needed to conceive or the impact on the long-term health of their children. And the industry places no limitations on eugenic practices such as sex selection, which is offered in nearly three-fourths of clinics.
And while it is certainly within the parameters of a good government to help families to grow, IVF does nothing to address the underlying causes of the problem it claims to address.
As pro-life activist Lila Rose posted on X, “IVF doesn’t address the root causes of the infertility health crisis in America. It’s a Big Pharma bandaid, with major ethical issues, like millions of frozen & destroyed embryos. If we want to Make America Healthy Again, we should invest in addressing and healing the underlying causes of infertility.”
Catholics have pioneered holistic approaches to women’s health and fertility such as Natural Procreative Technology (NaPro) that boast much better results than IVF without toxic hormonal exposure or moral or ethical dilemmas better suited to an Aldous Huxley novel. And now the scientific communities are catching up with advancements like the Oura Ring or at-home PdG testing with companies like Proov or the FDA-approved Natural Cycles app. These innovations are far more worthy of an executive order boon than a multibillion-dollar industry that has next to no guardrails to protect the health, safety, or dignity of all in its care.
We owe American families suffering the pain of infertility and seeking to bring precious new life into the world a lot more than throwing tax dollars at an industry that commodifies babies and bodies and is rife with risk. And as pro-lifers who have been advocating for the unborn at all stages of development for decades, we owe it to our integrity to speak out against expanding an industry that inherently entails destroying life to create it.