The next major culture war battle is taking shape in New York City, and it is all about the definition of the word “infertility.”
The City Council’s LGBTQIA+ Caucus is now arguing that the health insurance plan for city employees should extend in vitro fertilization coverage to gay men. Currently, up to three cycles of IVF are covered for those with documented infertility, but a recently filed lawsuit argued that “the City and its insurance company categorically exclude gay men and same-sex male couples from receiving those benefits.”
“The City’s policy stems from the way that the City’s healthcare plan defines ‘infertility’ as the inability to conceive a child through male-female unprotected sexual intercourse in a 12-month period or through intrauterine insemination,” the caucus wrote in a letter to New York City Mayor Eric Adams. “As the definition stands, gay men cannot qualify for IVF benefits, even when they have the same need for IVF as other employees and their partners. We believe this policy to be exclusionary and outdated.”
The Left is seeking to expand the definition of infertility from straight couples unable to conceive via the natural process to anyone who wants a baby without having sex.
To be fair, many words have lost their meanings since the beginning of the sexual revolution. Marriage has been redefined from the union between a man and a woman with the purpose of raising children to any couple who has romantic feelings for one another. Gender has been redefined from being biologically determined to being a social construct. Sexual intercourse has been redefined from being a procreative and unitive act between a married couple to being something that just feels good. Even unborn babies have been redefined as just clumps of cells. When all objective reality has been denied, it’s no wonder that the definition of “infertility” is next on the Left’s linguistic chopping block.
While attempting to change the meaning of infertility to include people who could never have conceived a child in the first place is ridiculous, it raises the question of whether it is morally permissible to create a child with the intention of depriving him of one or both of his biological parents. If a couple or a single mother uses donated eggs, sperm, or both to conceive children, at least one of the child’s parents will not be a part of his life.
Moreover, egg donors are often college-age women looking for an easy way to make money, but some regret doing so later in life. Sperm donors can get similar feelings of remorse. The donor IVF process effectively commodifies children, as customers can look through a catalog of possibilities to create their “ideal” children. All things being equal, children should not be designed in a lab like a custom action figure. But is it the responsibility of the government to regulate this aspect of the IVF process? That answer is unclear.
However, certain practices by the IVF industry raise serious pro-life concerns, which certainly do need to be addressed. Currently, in the United States, an IVF cycle can include the creation of 12 or more embryos, most of which never reach their mother’s uterus. Only some of the embryos are implanted, determined based on a judgment of their quality or whether they are the couple’s preferred sex. The rest are frozen indefinitely or destroyed.
A pro-life solution to this would be to require that the number of embryos created per cycle be limited to only those that will be implanted. This is the position taken by writer Ben Shapiro and numerous other pro-life advocates. Germany has taken this approach, only allowing three embryos to be created per IVF cycle and requiring them all to be transferred to the mother. There may still be moral concerns about the IVF process, but this solution reduces the most egregious intentional destruction of human life.
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There should also be a greater focus on fertility treatments other than IVF. Gamete intrafallopian transfer is a process somewhat similar to IVF, wherein eggs are retrieved but the actual fertilization occurs inside of the mother. While IVF is prohibited by the Catholic Church, GIFT is not. In fact, former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife used this process for their children. Natural Procreative Technology is a different process that helps promote fertility in women and has fairly high success rates.
As IVF has quickly been thrust into the forefront of the culture war, most people still are not educated about the process. A sweeping ban of IVF would not be politically feasible or advisable, but neither can the regulatory environment around the process remain almost nonexistent.