President Donald Trump’s recently-issued executive order promoting the accessibility of in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology is at odds with Roman Catholic values and “stands in contrast” to Trump’s other pro-family measures, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) said on Thursday.
“The IVF industry treats human beings like products and freezes or kills millions of children who are not selected for transfer to a womb or do not survive,” said Bishop Robert Barron and Bishop Daniel E. Thomas, who chair the USCCB’s committees on Pro-Life Activities and Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth. “Tuesday’s executive order promoting IVF is thus fatally flawed and stands in regrettable contrast to the promising pro-life actions of the Administration last month.”
Trump’s order will “protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments,” according to a White House fact sheet, and is a pro-baby measure, Trump said. The president previously called himself the “father” of IVF at a Fox News town hall in October.
“We want fertilization and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them,” Trump said at the time.
The Catholic bishops said in a statement Thursday that while Americans’ desire to “have children is both good and admirable,” the Trump administration’s full embrace of IVF, “which ends countless human lives and treats persons like property,” is not “the answer.” Support for restorative reproductive medicine that ethically addresses the “often-overlooked root causes of infertility” would be a better priority for the Trump administration than IVF, the bishops added.
“Every human person is a precious gift with infinite dignity and worth, no matter how that person was conceived. People born as a result of IVF have no less dignity than anyone else,” Barron and Thomas said. “It is our moral responsibility to uphold the dignity of their brothers and sisters who are never given the chance to be born.”
The Catholic Church has long opposed traditional IVF methods, as hundreds of thousands of embryos are estimated to be frozen, discarded, or donated to medical research annually. Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, has said that Trump’s pro-IVF attitude mirrors America’s.
“Catholic social teaching is obviously very robust. I think that no person who, or at least no one I know who’s Catholic, doesn’t accept that just because the Catholic Church teaches something, doesn’t mean you necessarily as a legislator need to affect that to public policy,” Vance told the New York Post last year. “I think it certainly influences how you think about issues, it certainly influences how I think about issues. But I think that there are a lot of things the Catholic Church teaches that frankly, Americans would just never go for.”
“You have to accept that you live in a Democratic society where you have to give people a full voice in the society,” Vance added. “You have to give people their ability to have their own moral views reflected in public policy. There are a lot of non-Catholics in America and I accept that.”