Back in March, Mercator predicted that IVF would become a major issue in the 2024 American election. Guess what? We were right. Five months later, a headline in Politico reads: “Democrats test a battleground theory: IVF fears can win against a ‘pro-choice’ Republican”.

Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, has already placed IVF front and centre of his campaign rhetoric. He and his wife Gwen spent seven years with IVF treatments before their daughter was born.

"This gets personal for me and my family," Walz told a rally in Philadelphia. "When my wife and I decided to have children we spent years going through infertility treatments. And I remember praying every night for a call for good news. The pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn't worked. So this wasn't by chance that when we welcomed my daughter into the world, we named her Hope." 

(Late flash: "Thank God for IVF," Walz told another interviewer. "My wife and I have two beautiful children." Except it wasn't embryo-destroying IVF at all, it turns out, but another kind of fertility treatment. "Governor Walz talks how normal people talk," his press secretary explained.)

In fact, the Democrats are using IVF as a wedge to detach anti-abortion Republicans from the Trump-Vance ticket. IVF, the argument goes, is “pro-life” because children are created for infertile couples. Opposing IVF is cruel and anti-life. It’s a powerful argument which has traction with voters.

According to a Pew Research Center survey published in May, 70% of American adults believe that IVF access is positive; 22% are unsure, and only 8% say it is negative. The survey found that even large majorities of white evangelicals (63%), black Protestants (69%) and Catholics (65%) view IVF as a good thing.

However, not many people have thought through the moral complexities of IVF. What can be wrong with a technology which allows a loving couple to have a baby, they ask.

But there are substantial moral issues.

The largest Protestant denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), recently defied the opinion polls and passed a resolution that made headlines across the US. A majority of its 10,000 delegates declared that: “though all children are to be fully respected and protected, not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified.” The SBC’s opposition is based principally on the fact that the IVF industry has created millions of frozen human embryos – and most of them will be destroyed.

Dr R. Albert Mohler Jr, the “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the US” according to Time magazine, ruefully acknowledged that “Far too many Christians say they believe in the sanctity and dignity of human life at every stage, from fertilization to natural death, but when the issue turns to the massive ethical issues related to IVF, many evangelicals, including far too many Southern Baptists, have refused to connect the dots.”

The Catholic Church connected the dots long ago. It has always opposed IVF and has developed a sophisticated critique based on its understanding of human sexuality. Its official Catechism states that IVF is “morally unacceptable” because it separates the marriage act from procreation and establishes “the domination of technology” over human life. It, too, is horrified at the fact that embryos are treated as raw material rather than human beings.

More surprising than the position of leading Christian churches, however, is the vehement opposition to the IVF industry displayed by some feminists, including the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Nicole Shanahan. She doesn’t mince her words. “I believe IVF is sold irresponsibly, and my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed,” she said in an essay in People magazine.

Shanahan is not a Christian, or not a practicing Christian at any rate. Millions of embryos on ice don’t appear to worry her. But she is a feisty feminist and she feels that the US$5 billion IVF industry is exploiting women.

“I’ve spent the past five years funding science to understand the environmental factors that impact women’s reproductive health because these have gone largely ignored,” Shanahan told Politico. “IVF is a very expensive for-profit business, and many of these clinics are owned by private equity firms that are not invested in the underlying health of women.”