Sometime in the middle of last week, liberal news organizations noticed that President Donald Trump is a little behind on what may well be the only campaign promise they actually wanted him to keep: his promise to help the average American afford in-vitro fertilization treatments should she want to get pregnant.
“The government is going to pay for [IVF], or we’re going to get — we’ll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that,” Trump told prospective voters almost exactly a year ago. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?”
At the time, that statement made pro-life Americans (myself included) do a double-take. Yes, we want to “produce babies in this country,” but not to the tune of 1.5 million tiny frozen humans, and certainly not at the risk of widespread trafficking of the infants who do make it to birth. The ends, as moralists and ethicists never tire of reminding us, do not justify the means. (READ MORE: Pedophiles Are Buying Children. Does Surrogacy Deserve More Scrutiny?)
Then, in February, Trump signed an executive order requiring Vince Haley, the assistant director to the president for domestic policy, to submit a list of policy recommendations to make IVF cheaper for Americans within 90 days. It seemed the president was going to do what he promised. Those 90 days passed, and we heard nothing. (RELATED: Catholics Cannot Endorse the President’s IVF Mandate)
Then the Washington Post reported last week that, per “two people with knowledge of internal discussions,” Trump has no plans “to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services.” (RELATED: Pedophiles Are Buying Children. Does Surrogacy Deserve More Scrutiny?)
It’s not exactly an official statement, but it did elicit something like a sigh of relief — despite the fact that Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, added, in a rather vaguely worded statement, that “President Trump pledged to expand access to fertility treatments for Americans who are struggling to start families … The Administration is committed like none before it to using its authorities to deliver on this pledge.”
It turns out that there are all sorts of problems with the original Trump promise. According to one senior official, mandating that insurance companies cover the treatment would require Congressional action; IVF would have to be considered an “essential health benefit,” and it’s a bit of a stretch to apply that label to the treatment. (RELATED: California Redefines ‘Infertility,’ Paves Way for More Abuses)
Not only that, but IVF treatments are expensive — a single round could cost as much as $25,000. Were insurance companies forced to cover it, they’d have to raise insurance premiums, which would hardly be a popular move among those Americans paying onerously high prices for insurance coverage.
Then there’s the fact that, despite what the IVF industry (an industry that’s expected to be worth $7.24 billion by 2030) wants you to believe, IVF isn’t the only answer to infertility. An approach broadly referred to as restorative reproductive medicine has recently been gaining popularity. It favors identifying the precise reason a woman may not be fertile and then addressing that reason, rather than simply injecting an embryo into a potentially hostile home and hoping for the best.
NBC News reported just last week that this approach may well be part of the reason the Trump administration isn’t willing to go full steam ahead on its promise to make IVF affordable. After all, shortly after that February executive order, Republican congressmen introduced bills in both the House and Senate to expand access to these (usually) cheaper, less invasive, and more moral treatments.
Just last month, associate editor at the Free Press, Madeline Kearns, highlighted her success story with an alternative fertility treatment called NaPro. She, like many other women, suffered from endometriosis and had been told that IVF was her only path to having children. That, as it turned out, wasn’t true. A compassionate (and less expensive) treatment of the underlying issue allowed her to conceive naturally. (If you haven’t read it yet, her story is a must-read for anyone suffering from infertility or who just wants to be better educated on the whole issue.) (READ MORE: ‘Three-Parent’ Human Experiment Becomes the Standard for a New IVF Treatment)
The fact is, the Trump administration generally perceives itself to be pro-life — as well it should. When President Trump claims that he was the man who got Roe v. Wade overturned, he’s not being overly hyperbolic. The New York Times recently reported that his current administration has plans to burn some $9.7 million in contraceptives sitting in a Belgian warehouse originally intended for some of the “poorest countries in Africa” because those contraceptives have been flagged as abortifacient. That’s the kind of action we expect from a pro-life administration.
Unfortunately, not everyone in the administration (Trump included) sees IVF as a pro-life issue. “Pro-life means pro-baby,” the argument seems to go, “and IVF produces more babies; therefore, it must be pro-life.”
The problem is that IVF isn’t pro-life. It not only opens the door to some truly horrifying opportunities for child abuse, it almost always costs the lives of 7-8 tiny humans for every one human successfully implanted in a mother’s womb. It’s all well and good that the administration is weakly “signaling” that it might backtrack on its campaign promises to fund IVF. It should do more.
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