There are a couple of things a woman never wants to hear from her doctor: “I’m sorry, you’re infertile, here are your options” is one of them — especially if the options aren’t really options.
After all, there is a reason little girls play with a vast array of baby dolls and stuffed animals. It’s the same reason teenagers browse Pinterest for wedding dresses and young women tend to eagerly purchase sourdough starter that ultimately sits in their fridge until it develops a grayish-brown film on top. Women, whether they recognize it or not (and they may not, courtesy of decades of feminist propaganda), have an innate desire to find a man, bear his children, and make a home. That may sound crude, but it’s true.
For a rapidly growing number of women, that dream — you might even call it a vocation — is an impossibility. Whether you blame it on vaccines, birth control, chemicals in drinking water, or poor diets and no exercise, it’s impossible not to admit that infertility is a problem.
From that perspective, President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to make in-vitro fertilization (IVF) affordable for the average American family is a compassionate fix to a growing problem. It’s pro-family in that families are able to be formed in the first place, and it’s pro-life in that children are being born in a society with falling birth rates.
But it would be entirely naïve to leave the issue there. Let’s be very clear. IVF is not pro-life and it’s not pro-family.
The question is, how do we make that argument? How can we be compassionate towards women who just want a baby while being effective in halting the creation of giant frozen libraries of human embryos? I’m no expert in campaigning. I’m just a 24-year-old journalist who is very guilty of that sourdough starter with the brown film in the fridge (it is reviveable, I promise), so consider my advice with that in mind.
The first step is simple: The pro-life movement needs to be incredibly clear about its position on IVF. The framing of it must be so simple and easy to explain that when politicians or parties claiming to be pro-life challenge it by word or act, it’s easy to call them out on it.
IVF, it should say, is immoral and wrong in all cases. It’s immoral because it results in the death of human embryos who possess eternal souls and therefore infinite dignity and worth in the eyes of God. And because it requires unnatural sexual actions to obtain the materials for the procedure. To put it even more simply: IVF kills humans and abuses human sexuality.
Without getting into the weeds of the issue, a single IVF procedure typically creates 7 to 8 embryos, 1 or 2 of which are implanted in the mother’s womb. The rest are usually frozen or discarded. As Ellie Gardey Holmes noted earlier this week in these pages: “These embryos have the unique DNA of individual human beings. The only difference is that they are living outside of their mother.” Effectively, providing federal funding for the procedure is equivalent to (and perhaps worse than) forcing taxpayers to fund mass abortions. (READ Ellie’s Analysis: With IVF Executive Order, Trump Bows to Radical Liberals)
Additionally, IVF allows for a whole host of abuses; for instance, it allows same-sex couples and wealthy celebrities to use IVF with a surrogate to avoid the inconvenience (or impossibility) of bearing their own children, thus severing the natural ties between mother and child.
But if we were to end our campaign against IVF there, we’d be making a grave mistake. There are a number of women — mothers, and grandmothers — who just read that declaration of immorality and flinched. Perhaps they are currently struggling with infertility, maybe they’ve turned to IVF to try and conceive a child, or perhaps they know someone, a friend or a daughter, who did. Sure there are a number of celebrities who have famously abused the procedure, but one imagines that the majority of the more than 85,000 IVF babies born in 2021 weren’t born into multi-million dollar households.
Our campaign must emphasize that those children aren’t any less human — in fact, it’s precisely because we believe that they have infinite value and dignity that we believe IVF is wrong. Simultaneously, we have to be gracious and understanding to the ever-increasing number of women who struggle with infertility and are told to turn to IVF.
It’s true that the ends do not justify the means, but if we aren’t willing to hold the hands of women struggling with infertility, talk through options (like adoption), or give them hope in any way we can, we shouldn’t be condemning them.
As Trump’s team sets out to do the research into policy changes and price cuts for IVF that his executive order compels it to do, it should also consider the morality of the issue and the other options available. Is it, for instance, possible to make it easier (and less expensive) to adopt? Or are there other treatments we can turn to or root causes we can uncover if we just look a little harder?
The answers to these kinds of questions are also part of the remedy for a broken American family.
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