Since returning to the White House on January 20, President Donald Trump has worked tirelessly to restore freedom, sovereignty, safety, and prosperity to the American nation and to secure the same for future generations.
IVF does not solve this issue or address the roots of the infertility crisis, it only masks some of the symptoms, and at a profound moral cost.
Despite the bitter and, frankly, hypocritical remonstrations of U.S. Catholic bishops, many of Trump’s bold policy positions — such as securing the nation’s borders, deporting illegal immigrants who wantonly violate the nation’s laws, and working to ensure that American Christians are protected, instead of targeted, by the federal government — are laudable and are firmly in line with the moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church.
However, the president’s recent executive order “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization” cannot be supported by any Catholic and must instead be vocally condemned. Significantly, the Catholic Church condemns the practice as immoral. The use of rapidly advancing technologies to address issues of infertility is not, in and of itself, immoral, according to the Vatican’s Donum Vitae, but the use of certain procedures and technologies is rendered immoral when they violate either the order that God has ordained or the dignity of the human person. In vitro fertilization (IVF) does both.
First, when God created man and woman and instituted the sacrament of marriage, he ordained that children should be created by means of sexual intercourse. IVF has “made it possible to procreate apart from sexual relations,” Donum Vitae clarifies. This is itself a grave moral evil. The primary purpose of sex is not pleasure, as the secularists and hedonists proclaim, but procreation. The two are inherently and intrinsically inseparable. It is for this reason that such things as masturbation, contraception, homosexual acts, and, to a certain extent, abortion are similarly condemned by the Church.
While moral evils such as masturbation, contraception, homosexual acts — or, far more violently, abortion — attempt to remove procreation from sex, IVF does the inverse and attempts to remove sex from procreation. In short, IVF is another means of rejecting God’s divine plan and effectively, with the assistance of technology unbridled from moral restraints, declaring oneself to be “God.”
Second, IVF violates the dignity of the human person. It may come as a surprise to many to learn that IVF likely ends more lives than even abortion. While IVF clinics typically do not collect or report data on how many human embryos are created or destroyed, Illume Fertility estimates that about 80 percent of extracted eggs — out of, let’s say, 12 — will be viable, and about 80 percent of those will be successfully fertilized, yielding seven or eight human embryos per woman attempting IVF.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), at least 238,000 women attempted IVF in 2021. Assuming that each of those women created seven or eight human embryos, IVF would yield anywhere from 1.6 million to nearly 2 million human embryos over the course of a year. Yet only about 100,000 of those human embryos were successfully brought to term, meaning that anywhere from 1.5 million to 1.8 million human embryos were destroyed or frozen — just over the course of a single year. The Catholic Church, of course, teaches that human life begins at the moment of conception — meaning the moment that one of those eggs is fertilized in a test tube. Yet hundreds of thousands — potentially millions — are destroyed every year through IVF.
Although Trump states that his administration “recognizes the importance of family formation, and as a Nation, our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,” his decision to expand access to IVF will not, in the end, benefit American families. It may artificially or superficially elevate the U.S. birth rate by minute margins, but it will erode the unitive marital act necessary to begin a family, in addition to killing off the brothers and sisters of whichever children are fortunate enough to survive the IVF process.
Of course, it is a tragedy that an increasing number of women struggle with infertility. Newly-minted U.S. Health Secretary and self-professed Catholic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reported that approximately 13 percent of women “are having difficulty getting pregnant or carrying their pregnancy to term.” But IVF does not solve this issue or address the roots of the infertility crisis, it only masks some of the symptoms, and at a profound moral cost.
Kennedy has famously pledged to “Make America Healthy Again” and to solve the nation’s chronic disease epidemic by addressing its root causes. If the Trump administration truly wishes to serve American families and help husbands and wives begin and expand their families in a natural and wholesome manner, the administration ought to apply Kennedy’s chronic disease approach to the nation’s infertility crisis. God, the moral law, and the millions of Christians who voted for Trump demand as much.
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