Don’t give Trump a pass on IVF

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 04, 2025

Whether or not President Trump discusses in vitro fertilization in his State of the Union address tonight, IVF is a topic that should be on the minds of pro-life Americans.

That Trump has promised to broaden access to IVF should be no surprise; he made that promise during his campaign. What is a surprise is that some prominent pro-lifers have urged us not to complain. On balance Trump has been good for the pro-life movement, they argue; we should not weaken him by criticism.

As I wrote several years ago, during the early days of the first Trump presidency, the logic of that argument is fatally flawed. Let me repeat a portion of my post from 2017:

In 1980, when Reagan was elected, I was working in Washington, at the Heritage Foundation. Reagan’s victory in that November election delighted conservatives, since (unlike Trump) he had been identified with the conservative movement for years. We looked forward anxiously to his inauguration, confident that his plans would closely match our hopes. Shortly before he entered the White House (or maybe it was soon thereafter; my memory is a bit uncertain), Reagan held a meeting with some of the key conservative leaders in Washington. Ed Feulner, then president of the Heritage Foundation, attended that meeting. When Ed returned, we all naturally wanted to know what Reagan had said. I have never forgotten the response.

“Reagan said that he needs pressure from the Right,” Ed told us.

Reagan knew (Ed explained) that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the three major TV networks would batter away with their criticism, consistently pounding him with liberal criticism. Without countervailing pressure from the opposite side of the political spectrum, he reasoned, there would be a natural tendency to drift toward the liberal perspective; the squeaky wheel would be greased. Reagan wanted conservatives to neutralize that leftward pressure, and in the process to keep his administration faithful to its conservative principles.

Reagan wanted constructive criticism. He knew that he could not satisfy every conservative hope, but he wanted us to keep pushing for more. A canny politician, he knew that if he could deliver 75% of what we demanded, and we complained about the missing 25%, his policies would appear more moderate, more acceptable to the general public.

By the same logic, social conservatives—those of us who hope that the Trump administration will prove friendly to family, faith, and natural law—should not hesitate to criticize our new President, for what he does and what he fails to do.

Federal support for IVF would require the taxpayers to subsidize a profit-making industry: an industry that is almost completely unregulated, and open to abuse. If we encourage IVF clinics to produce more human embryos, how long will it take the entrepreneurs to notice that unused embryos might be sold to medical researchers? For that matter, how do we know that gametes are not already on the market?

Most of the public criticism of IVF has rightly focused on the fact that the procedure results in thousands of unused, fertilized human embryos: unborn babies who will be frozen, stored, and eventually left to die. Already the number of these doomed babies produced by IVF every year outnumbers the death toll from legal abortions in the US. If the unused embryos are not destroyed, they are tempting targets for exploitation: to be used for spare parts, perhaps, or as the subjects for ugly custody battles in divorce cases.

But the fate of these poor defenseless babies is not the only compelling argument against IVF. Even if the procedure did not result in the waste of these unborn lives, it would still be an offense against the integrity of marriage. Think about how the gametes are collected: a cold, sterile process for the woman; a degrading and gravely sinful act for the man.

The general acceptance of contraception severed the link between the marital act and reproduction, allowing intimacy without procreation, with disastrous results for our families and our society. Now IVF threatens to do the same damage from the opposite direction, allowing procreation without intimacy. When IVF becomes commonplace, children are robbed of the healthy presumption that they were conceived in an act of marital love.

We can and should feel compassion for the married couples who find that they cannot conceive children. A truly “pro-family” approach to health care would provide them with any possible assistance to make their reproductive systems function as they should. (That’s what medical care is, after all: the effort to make human organs work properly.) Sadly, given the limits of our medical knowledge, some would still be unable to produce children, and that would be—that is—a heavy cross to bear. But it is wrong and dangerous for politicians to suggest that every couple has a “right” to children. Children are a gift, not a commodity. And if some couples have a “right” to children, our courts are bound to follow legal precedents and extend that “right” to all couples—not just married, not just heterosexual.

Moreover, while IVF advocates demand our sympathy for childless married couples, the procedure itself allows for ready exploitation by many other less sympathetic characters. IVF opens the door to surrogacy, to the exploitation of impoverished women for the benefit of elitists who choose to avoid the inconveniences of pregnancy, to the selective breeding of designer babies.

And again, all these evils could be accomplished with the help of your tax dollars. So if you don’t want to be complicit, don’t give Trump a pass on IVF.