Last week, President Trump announced new federal guidance on insurance coverage for IVF (in vitro fertilization) services. The new system would make opting into fertility benefits similar to opting in for dental or vision benefits as part of an employer’s insurance plan. This will mean giving deep discounts to couples seeking some of the leading IVF treatments, by spreading their cost among those with health insurance. Moshe Margaretten, founder of Americans for IVF, called it a “huge leap forward in the fight to make fertility care affordable.” The president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ryan T. Anderson, said that the White House worked closely with conservative groups who lobbied against any expansion of what they deem an unethical practice and described the result as perhaps “the least bad that we could have hoped for.”
The fact is the president, like much of the public, views IVF treatment as pro-baby and pro-family. Conservatives and those who oppose IVF on ethical and moral grounds have had difficulty making their case to the public. The people availing themselves of IVF are not, like many of those seeking abortion, seeking a way out of the consequences of their own actions. They cannot be considered shirkers in any sense. They are, for the most part, married couples with the commendable desire to make the stable home they’ve founded together in love, one in which children are raised responsibly. Their infertility is no fault of their own.
In fact, much of the public has not thought deeply about how IVF works or why people would object to it. President Trump confessed as much when asked about pro-lifers who object to it. “I don’t know about the views of that . . . I think this is very pro-life. You can’t get more pro-life than this.”
Here are the facts. IVF involves extracting eggs from the ovaries of women and fertilizing them with individual sperm, often creating dozens of embryonic siblings. The most promising are selected for implantation. Those unselected are destroyed or put on ice for potential future use. If, as in some cases, several of the eggs implant successfully, doctors will recommend selective abortion to reduce risks to the mother of a multiple pregnancy and to increase the chances for the remaining baby or babies.
Annually, the abortion industry claims about 985,000 embryonic and fetal lives. IVF leads to the creation and death of between 1.5 million and 1.8 million more embryos.
The children who result from IVF are beloved members of their family. But the process of IVF naturally leads to embryo destruction. Given the moral stakes, the Trump administration shouldn’t be actively encouraging more of it.