With women delaying their plans to have children into the back half of their 30s, in vitro fertilization is becoming normalized. And I understand the political pressure that the White House felt. I wanted to echo what we wrote in our editorial about the Trump administration’s expansion of IVF coverage, which means a dramatic expansion in the number of embryos created and discarded. We write:
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 families and communities. But their existence is in some way shadowed by the moral transgressions that accompanied their creation. They were not received as the result of self-giving love between parents, or the great burning of human passions, but through a medical process that selected for them, a medical process that selected against their siblings, and with reasons for doing so.
The resulting children are qualified for birth. This subtly conditions parents, society, and children all to see human dignity not as something that inheres in our very existence, but that in some way hangs upon merit or accidents. It’s not just the abortions that are objectionable in this process. Children deserve parents who can say honestly, we received you as a gift and treasure you no matter what, come what may. The moral theft inherent in IVF robs parents of the ability to say that with full honesty.
IVF’s insidiousness is that it promises sympathetic parents a life to love, but it does so at the cost of entrenching what John Paul II called the “culture of death,” which discards those deemed unfit to live, whether they are embryos, the elderly, or the infirm.