By Kimberley Heatherington and Peter Jesserer Smith, OSV News
(OSV News) — President Donald Trump’s Feb. 18 executive order on in vitro fertilization is the president’s first step toward fulfilling a campaign trail promise to expand IVF. Trump’s executive order “directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments,” according to a statement issued that same day by the White House. It quoted Trump as saying, “We want more babies, to put it very nicely.”
But the actual outcome, as Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, pointed out in a statement Feb. 19, is likely to be much different.
IVF treatments — which fertilize an egg outside the body in a laboratory dish — are opposed by the Catholic Church because they frequently involve the destruction of human embryos, in addition to other ethical and moral issues.
“In my experience, I have observed that many Catholics have only a vague notion of what the church teaches about IVF, since they have usually not received significant formation on the issue,” noted Father Tad Pacholczyk, director of education and a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “The typical Catholic is often unable to explain why IVF is wrong,” he told OSV News.
Out of more than 413,000 artificial reproductive technology cycles recorded in 2021, only 112,088 resulted in pregnancy. Of those, only 97,128 babies were successfully born, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Multiple embryos are typically created for use in an IVF cycle, so the number of human embryos currently created each year by IVF in the U.S. runs into the hundreds of thousands with the majority typically lost through what fertility clinics on their websites explain as “IVF attrition.”
In one example provided by an IVF clinic, 10 harvested mature eggs may yield eight human embryos through IVF; of these embryos, just three to four may develop into embryos viable for transfer after cryopreservation. Typically one embryo — or two in some cases — is then implanted in each attempted transfer. CDC data shows 45% of embryo transfers on average result in a single live birth for women under 35, and the average diminishes to 23% for women under 40.
“By doing IVF, we act against the human dignity of our children by setting up a subclass of those who originate in petri dishes and test tubes rather than in the intimacy of the one-flesh union of spouses,” said Father Pacholczyk, while emphasizing “the problem with IVF is never with the child.”
“Humans are meant to be loved into being through that mutual spousal self-gift of the marital act,” he said, “rather than produced through manufacturing methods and laboratory protocols.”
Conscience issues must also be considered if the Trump administration ever moves to some type of IVF mandate.
“Such a mandate would be immoral,” Father Pacholczyk observed — echoing arguments heard in 2011 when the Obama administration attempted to compel the Little Sisters of the Poor to include abortifacient coverage in their employee health coverage — “since insurers and employers would presumably be forced, and therefore complicit in, financially subsidizing in vitro fertilization procedures for their employees.”
It would, Father Pacholczyk added, “constitute an intrusion into the religious works and governance of the church and represent a federally mandated violation of her members’ consciences.”
Bishop Burbidge’s statement underscored the point: “In practice and principle, IVF is incompatible with the president’s evident support for the good of human life and his desire to encourage family formation.”
He proposed “life-affirming and positive actions” that President Trump and federal and state lawmakers take instead: “Consider concrete ways to encourage earlier marriage and family formation, establish programs to address direct pregnancy and childbirth-related expenses that may act as a barrier to the growth of families, and expand coverage for life-affirming and restorative fertility care.”
“We must work for building up families,” he said, “in ways which do not entail the destruction of human life.”
Kimberley Heatherington writes for OSV News from Virginia. Peter Jesserer Smith is the national news editor for OSV News.