Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump startled many in the pro-life movement last week when he declared that if elected president, he would create a mandate for health insurance companies to cover the cost of controversial in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. But pro-life advocates say that IVF entails the destruction of human life on an immense scale and is rife with human rights abuses due to how unregulated the fertility industry is.
During an interview with NBC News, Trump stated, “We are going to be, under the Trump administration, … paying for [IVF] treatment,” adding, “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.” When asked to clarify if the government or health insurance providers would pay for the treatment under his proposal, Trump responded that insurance companies would pay “under a mandate, yes.”
While debate over the ethical and moral issues involved in IVF has been dwarfed in recent years by the intense debate over abortion, the IVF issue shot back into the spotlight in February when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that parents of embryos that were accidentally destroyed by a fertility clinic could sue for the wrongful death of a child. Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately seized on the ruling, claiming that the GOP would use it as a pretext to ban IVF, despite the fact that no Republican had put forward such a proposal. Still, a number of prominent Republicans, most notably Trump and his running mate Senator J.D. Vance (D-Ohio), appear to be fearful of losing votes over the issue and now say they want to expand the practice.
But human rights advocates like Them Before Us Founder Katy Faust say that many conservatives and even some in the pro-life movement do not fully understand the moral and ethical ramifications of IVF.
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“Two percent of children in this country are born every year through IVF — that’s about 90,000 children,” she explained during Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “But that’s only a fraction of the children that are created in laboratories, in petri dishes [through] in vitro fertilization. The vast majority of those children, 93 to 97%, are going to lose their [lives] in the baby-making process of Big Fertility. Why? Because parents are routinely encouraged to create many more embryos than they would ever possibly implant or raise.”
Faust went on to detail how “eugenics is applied to these kids when it comes to deciding which ones live or die, which ones are implanted, which ones are frozen, which ones are discarded, which ones are donated to research. Unfortunately, by the numbers, Big Fertility destroys more embryonic life every year than the abortion industry does. So the truth is, if we are fighting for children’s right to life, we must reject IVF the way that it is practiced in almost all forms today.”
Another concerning aspect of IVF, Faust argued, is how unregulated the industry is, resulting in a wide range of emerging dangers to human dignity and rights.
“Big Fertility is virtually regulation free — it has been described accurately as a Wild West,” she noted. “If you can do it and you’ve got the money, it can be done. Somebody will do it for you. That includes using it as somewhat of a surrogate tourism industry where people will make IVF babies using sperm or egg from all kinds of places implanted in that womb or a surrogate’s womb. Travel here, pick them up, fly home, have a foothold for American citizenship as a result of it.”
Faust continued, “We definitely see this very disturbing trend of same-sex couples or single men who are creating children using surrogates, always with the help of IVF. Of those 90,000 children born every year, 30 to 60,000 of them are going to be created using sperm or egg donors. So those children are going to lose their mother and father right at the moment of conception. There [are] no rules against any of these practices — eugenic screening children, cutting them off from their mother or father. Unfortunately, this is not a child-friendly industry, no matter how you splice it.”
As for those couples who are struggling with infertility, Faust urged a measured approach that does not undermine the dignity of children, while also highlighting alternative technologies that don’t involve embryo manipulation and destruction.
“You have got to make sure that you are not forcing the least of these, forcing … children to sacrifice on your behalf,” she emphasized. “…Throughout this world of marriage and family and parenthood, you are going to come across problems and challenges and struggles, and in all of those situations, someone is going to have to do the hard thing. It will either be the adults who work, reform, figure out a way to solve their problems without violating the rights of kids, or it will be kids that do hard things on behalf of adults.”
“If you’re struggling with infertility, which is a crushing burden,” Faust acknowledged, “I would really encourage you to seek alternatives like NaPro Technology, which identifies and resolves the underlying fertility issues so you don’t have to be dependent on a fertility doctor to have the babies that you so desperately long for.”
LifeNews Note: Dan Hart writes for the Family Research Council. He is the senior editor of The Washington Stand.
