Making Sense of Bioethics: The Trump executive order on IVF

On Feb. 18, President Trump issued an executive order entitled, “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization” (IVF), in which he stated, “My 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.” 

The order sets in motion a review process to obtain policy recommendations for “protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.” 

Although it seeks the good end of fostering family building, it embraces a reckless and unethical means of pursuing that goal. By doing so, it champions wrongdoing and cooperates in evil.

The use of IVF to bring new human life into the world always involves a disordered choice on the part of a couple or an individual. By allowing various third parties and employees from the infertility industry to build their children for them, parents commodify, objectify and instrumentalize both their own sexuality and the vulnerable bodies of their embryonic children. 

Because of IVF, an industry has arisen that, at its core, produces and markets human beings, and treats persons as products. This has had the effect of establishing a subclass and dehumanizing an entire segment of humanity: those who can now be sold, exploited, manipulated or handed over to stem cell researchers for destruction. 

Every human being has the right to be conceived under his or her mother’s heart, in the safety of her body, and under the loving embrace of his or her parents. Instead of receiving their offspring as “gift” through their own marital embrace, those who seek IVF pursue a false “right” to manufacture their sons and daughters in laboratory glassware. 

This results in collateral damage on multiple levels, including the freezing and destruction of embryonic children, eugenic screening of those children for specific traits or sex selection, heightened rates of birth defects, the taking advantage of surrogate mothers, and the “selective reduction” of multiplet pregnancies.

Given the moral objectionability of IVF, what should the administration do when it comes to IVF? 

Simply put, the opposite of what it has done thus far. 

It should seek to forbid the practice through statutory mechanisms, or, if that is not yet politically possible, limit and circumscribe the practice by bringing it under tight regulation and oversight. 

Rather than cooperating with the multi-billion dollar infertility industry and playing into its agenda by expanding IVF funding and availability, the Trump administration ought to clamp down on this largely unregulated behemoth. 

The golden rule in the IVF industry has long been that if it makes gold, it’s got to be good and ethical. Its unique and much-touted “self-regulation” has made it into something of a laughingstock, so much so that the industry is often branded by the epithet, “the wild west of infertility.”

Strict regulation of IVF has a strong precedent even in some of the more progressive countries in Europe. If Germany and Italy have been able to regulate IVF by passing laws that restrict the production of embryos to a maximum of three at a time, with the requirement that all three be implanted, why couldn’t the administration, at a minimum, establish similar regulations to limit the collateral damage of IVF in the US? 

In our country, hundreds of thousands of cryopreserved human embryos have been abandoned and condemned to perpetual stasis in liquid nitrogen. The practical effect of the Italian and German laws has been to preclude the production of supernumerary embryos during IVF, and to eliminate the humanitarian tragedy of freezing and storage of the youngest human beings by clinics.

For couples facing infertility, the administration could take the ethically upright approach of promoting, and assuring coverage for, restorative reproductive medicine in place of IVF. This medical approach pursues a thorough evaluation of the underlying causes of a couple’s infertility and provides tailored therapies so they can bring new life into the world through the marital embrace.

It seeks to address the causal mechanisms of infertility such as an inability to ovulate, low sperm count, endometriosis, blocked fallopian tubes and/or early miscarriages during pregnancy. Among the better-known examples of this approach are NaPro Technology, FEMM and NeoFertility.

The laudable goal of making it easier for “loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children” could also be promoted through other creative strategies, including changing tax structures to incentivize stay-at-home spouses, subsidies for childbirth expenses, the expansion of healthcare access and coverage, educational vouchers and other steps to increase the likelihood that more children will be welcomed into a family.

Rather than governmental intrusions promoting exploitative technologies like IVF, Americans are entitled to upright approaches that beckon life into society through loving acts of marital intimacy and nurture and support it within the sanctuary of the family.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, and serves as Senior Ethicist at The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See ncbcenter.org and fathertad.com.