As the Trump administration and the Republican Party appear to be moving toward greater institutional support for in vitro fertilization, the pro-life movement would be mistaken to treat this as a settled debate, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of first principles.
When it comes to politics, it would be understandable for observers to believe this debate was over before it began and that continued resistance is futile. IVF has long been legal, and there isn’t momentum to restrict it in any significant way at the federal level. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump moved the GOP toward a position of explicitly supporting these procedures, going so far as to call himself the “father of IVF.” He also pledged to initiate taxpayer funding for the procedure.
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Last summer, as pro-lifers worried that the Republican Party would soften its decades of support for the rights of unborn children, the party altered its platform to embrace IVF by name. Where once the platform document stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” now it says only that the party will “oppose Late Term Abortion.” It pledges to support “IVF (fertility treatments).” Notably, some national pro-life groups endorsed this modified platform while saying little or nothing about its unfortunate departure from precedent.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has affirmed its support for IVF. In February, Trump directed the White House Domestic Policy Council to develop recommendations for reducing the costs of IVF and expanding access to these procedures. If they exist, the specifics of those recommendations have yet to be made public. Some GOP lawmakers have articulated support for placing limited guardrails around how IVF is conducted, but the momentum seems to be in the direction of outright government endorsement and monetary support.
Despite this seemingly widespread embrace of IVF, including among Republicans, those in the pro-life movement must continue making the case against it. Pro-lifers have long opposed IVF because these procedures typically create more than one embryo. The “excess” human beings are then either destroyed or frozen indefinitely, both of which are grave violations of the dignity of human life. While some in the GOP have proposed forbidding IVF procedures that create additional embryos, it seems unlikely that such a regulation will stick, in large part because of the inefficiency and extra cost of conducting IVF in this manner.
What’s more, IVF is often practiced with explicitly eugenic aims, using embryo screening for sex-selection or to create “designer babies” by selecting for preferred characteristics and destroying embryos that don’t meet the desired profile. Widespread use of IVF is also at the forefront of efforts to redefine the family and undermine the model that is best for children: growing up with their married mother and father. Using IVF to facilitate the claim that childbearing is an individual right opens the door for anyone, including same-sex couples or single individuals, to access IVF on the same legal grounds as married couples. Foremost among the problems with such a system is that it treats children as commodities, available to whomever is willing to foot the bill, with no regard for the well-being or rights of the children involved.
The pro-life position against treating human beings in this manner also has a corollary positive case, a case for developing healthcare solutions that actually support reproductive health, especially women’s health. Many who support IVF believe that it is in some sense “pro-life,” arguing that it brings children into the world and helps parents who are struggling with infertility. While this is an admirable aim, this argument overlooks that IVF typically also takes the lives of unborn children, and IVF does nothing to address the root causes of infertility.
In a joint report earlier this spring from the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Heritage Foundation, a number of authors made the case for “restorative reproductive medicine,” which works to diagnose and treat the various diseases that cause infertility. “In vitro fertilization may succeed in producing an embryonic child outside of the body,” the authors write, “but it cannot heal or improve ongoing reproductive health conditions in the body that often lead to miscarriage, the failure to implant, or painful symptoms.”
Restorative medicine, which, unlike IVF, can diagnose and often resolve infertility, deserves attention and support, and this field needs far more funding and research than it currently receives. Unfortunately, it tends to be largely overlooked, at least in part because most of the money and attention in the realm of infertility tends to go toward IVF.
As a result, we are witnessing a society-wide failure to help couples comprehensively resolve infertility. What’s more, our healthcare system is also failing to support those who suffer from reproductive dysfunction but who aren’t trying to conceive and who therefore aren’t technically experiencing infertility. These patients face significant symptoms that deserve treatment, regardless of whether they are currently trying to conceive or whether they ever will do so.
It is far too common for doctors to tell women that the symptoms of endometriosis or PCOS, for instance, aren’t worth taking seriously unless they’re ready to have children. This leaves women struggling with serious, untreated health problems — often for years or decades — and it needlessly delays resolving the fertility troubles that accompany these disorders. There are far too many stories of doctors refusing to investigate the root causes of infertility until couples spend at least a year trying to conceive, or refusing to investigate the causes of miscarriage until a woman has suffered several.
In addition to promoting restorative reproductive medicine, pro-life Americans should aim to engage in the IVF debate with an emphasis on the first principles that underlie this issue. There are a number of important policy questions at stake, to be sure: Should IVF be legally permissible? Should the government explicitly support IVF? Should taxpayer money subsidize it?
But it would be a mistake to view this debate as, first and foremost, a debate over policy. As I wrote recently in Public Discourse, we can’t get our policy answers right unless we first address far deeper questions: “What are children for? Does anyone have a right to a child? Do children have a right to be conceived and raised in any particular way? What does ‘family planning’ mean, and are all forms of ‘family planning’ acceptable? Does a good end justify any means?”
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Without giving these deeper questions due consideration, we appear to have arrived at a consensus in favor of IVF. But these questions remain, and the answers matter. We shouldn’t settle for a pro-IVF position that allows our society to treat children as objects to be produced at will, even as we sympathize with the rightly ordered desire to have children.
As this policy debate continues to unfold, pro-lifers should advocate a comprehensive medical view of fertility, one that is consistent with sound ethical principles and that doesn’t settle for IVF as a supposed healthcare solution. And while in the current political climate it might be tempting to ignore the ways in which IVF undermines pro-life principles, those in the pro-life movement must not remain silent and thus concede that IVF is morally acceptable or that it constitutes treatment for infertility. The coherence of the pro-life position demands a consistent defense of all human life, no matter which way the political winds are blowing.
Alexandra DeSanctis is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributor to National Review.