IVF Is Not Pro-Life

D onald Trump, who, while campaigning, had promised to make America fertile again, delivered his long-awaited fertility-policy announcements on October 16 from the Oval Office. “I think this is very pro-life. You can’t get more pro-life than this,” he said, referring to his efforts to make in vitro fertilization more accessible, thereby making clear to the few who still weren’t aware that the man does not know what pro-life means.

Unborn human life is innocent human life and deserves protection. In vitro fertilization creates innocent human lives that might be born as well as lives that will not see the light of day. There are such lives — human embryos, much more than cells in a petri dish — on ice right now.

“Beautiful American children!” the president said he looks forward to. “There’s gonna be a lot of Trump babies,” Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, predicted in a press conference after Trump’s address, which included updated guidance from the Departments of Labor, the Treasury, and Health and Human Services, as well as news of a government agreement with a fertility-drug manufacturer to offer its treatments to Americans more affordably.

Some of you will remember New York–area commercials for Crazy Eddie, the electronics store, from the 1980s. The prices are INSANE. This is how parts of the White House event sounded but with the additional element of something heartbreaking: hope. Heartbreaking because the new federal guidance about fertility treatments was well-intentioned and supported by honest brokers in the room, including parents whose dreams of parenthood were made possible because of IVF. But that is not everyone’s story. And the issue is much more complicated than how it was presented.

From a principled pro-life perspective, the White House announcement could have been worse. There were no employer mandates, just encouragement. And among the recommendations were benefits for restorative reproductive medicine — which is just good old-fashioned health care and can include things as simple as hormone therapy. But to pro-lifers who are disappointed, and to pro-choicers who just hate the president irrespective of this latest announcement, I have the same thing to say: Be free. Put not your trust in princes.

Roe v. Wade focused the national mind. It united and divided us, in different ways. Though I blame my own religious tribe for this, the Democratic Party became inhospitable to life. The first Catholic president was a Democrat. The second, too. (As was the current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.) Joe Biden at the start of his political career was anti-abortion. But his party changed, so he did too. Former Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles J. Chaput once said he would have never predicted that the Democratic Party would become the party of abortion on demand because there were too many Catholics in it. The Catholics put their Catholicism to the side, it seems. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, but here we are. People who recognize that abortion is the human rights issue of our time often find themselves forced to vote Republican — or at least not Democrat.

That changed last year, when the Republicans dropped from their platform the goal of ending abortion. Not only did Trump declare victory over Roe; he declared abortion a state issue and promised to make IVF more accessible. People who had previously bought into his pro-life talk had a rude awakening.

We need to do better to make sure that every woman has the support she needs to choose motherhood. There are pregnant women right now who don’t think that raising the children within them is plausible. We want every woman to know that she can be a mother if she wants to, regardless of what label we choose to describe our convictions. We also want her to know that adoption can be an incredibly generous and responsible parenting decision. Birth mothers are some of the most self-sacrificial people alive. And to women suffering from infertility: You deserve real health care from a doctor who is willing to listen and not rush into invasive treatments that may not live up to presidential hype.

The theme for the 2026 March for Life this year is, “Life is a gift.” And what a gift it would be to be able to talk about human life, unchained from ideological loyalties. How can we simply let mothers be mothers? And let every baby be loved? Politics has so compromised us that we often can’t see the human lives beyond the labels. No more.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.