Trump signs executive order to expand access for IVF

February 21, 2025 17 Reactions

Donald Trump has been giving so many government programs a cold shower in his first weeks in the White House that it was surprising to see that his executive order in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was mostly hot air.

“To support American families, it is the policy of my Administration to ensure reliable access to IVF treatment,” he declared on Tuesday, “including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.”

But the only concrete outcome was to demand policy proposals to increase access and decrease costs within 90 days.

This defers a national debate over the merits of IVF for a few months. But it is clear from the executive order and his comments on the campaign trail last year that the President is fully in favour of IVF. At an all-women town hall in October, he bizarrely claimed to be “the father of IVF”. Whatever that meant, it’s clear that he regards support for IVF as a vote-winning tactic without any downside. Everyone, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican seems to support IVF.

As a White House fact sheet said, “President Trump has long advocated for more babies and expanding American families: ‘Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely … IVF treatments are expensive. It’s very hard for many people to do it and to get it, but I’ve been in favor of IVF, right from the beginning.”

However, there are many downsides to expanding access to IVF – it’s simply not good for the children, for their parents, for families, and for the nation. Here are a few issues that the Trump Administration must take into account.

IVF will not increase the birth rate. It is very unlikely that IVF will boost America’s flagging birth rate. Replacement level fertility is about 2.1 children per woman – the US figure is about 1.6. The argument is that IVF will help women who are unable to conceive and the fertility rate will rise.

But the birth rate is low largely because women are deferring motherhood until their late 30s, when their fertility declines steeply. Yes, IVF treatment does help some older women have babies, but this just fosters false hope in other women who postpone children until it is too late. It’s quite possible that freely available IVF could actually depress the birth rate. Other countries have tried subsidised IVF without success.

According to a study by the Cato Institute: “The false sense of security produced by the promise of a government-funded fertility insurance policy could influence would-be parents to delay having children, only to realize that childbearing is impossible or impossibly challenging, even with reproductive technology’s help.”

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IVF is not always family-friendly. Yes, IVF enables many infertile married couples to have the blessing of children. But it has also enabled an explosion in parenthood for gay couples and single men and women. A policy statement issued recently by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the peak body for the IVF industry, said that “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and unpartnered individuals” have a right to have families.

In fact, Trump’s executive order declared that “our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”. It says nothing about whether those mothers and fathers should be married.

As an example of the kind of complications that accompany IVF, the latest issue of Reproductive Biomedicine Online, a journal for IVF practitioners, highlighted the case of a female-to-male transgender person whose partner was a male-to-female transgender person. With the help of IVF and a surrogate mother, they had a child. Is that the kind of family that Mr Trump wants to support?

IVF commodifies human beings. Children who become commodities will not be treated with the dignity that they deserve as unique and irreplaceable human beings. Mistakes in the IVF industry are not uncommon. This week, a white Georgia woman announced that she was suing the IVF clinic which implanted the embryo of a black couple in her womb. She was forced to surrender the child to its biological parents.

IVF is run by greedy companies who want to make big profits. The IVF industry is portrayed in the media as a fairy-godmother. But IVF is a business and doctors are human beings driven by profit maximization. According to an American lawyer who specialises in fertility issues, Adam Wolf:“The US IVF industry is an enormous business. While fertility clinics can do great things, make no mistake: this is a huge industry with lots of money. Hedge funds are investing heavily in the space, and some now even own large networks of fertility clinics.”

IVF creates insoluble moral dilemmas. The most obvious of these is the multiplication of frozen embryos in American IVF clinics. There are no reliable figures but it is estimated that there are about a million of them. They are too precious to destroy or to donate to science, but not precious enough to be implanted in a mother’s womb.

The existence of IVF has also created a world-wide surrogacy industry. Couples or individuals who can’t have their own children rent the wombs of women in poor and remote countries like Ukraine, Georgia, Laos or Cambodia. Trafficking and exploitation are huge problems. Surrogacy is a human rights nightmare.

IVF outsources sexual intimacy. Embryologists and accountants become as much a part of the process of creating a baby as the parents. This is wrong. Every human being has a right to begin life as an act of love by a mother and a father.

Admittedly, this is not a popular view outside the Catholic Church. But it's also the opinion of Dolce and Gabbana, the Italian gay fashion icons. In an interview with the Italian magazine Panorama, they set out the ethical case against IVF as well as any theologian has. “No chemical offspring and rented uterus: life has a natural flow, there are things that should not be changed … You are born to a mother and a father – or at least that’s how it should be. I call them children of chemistry, synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog.”

IVF is a gateway to eugenics. Professor Robert Edwards, the British medical scientist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering IVF, was a member of Britain’s Eugenics Society for most of his career. His dreams for the technology he invented were steeped in eugenics. The temptation for his successors to engage in consumer-driven eugenics is going to be almost irresistible. Such services are not available at the moment, but clinics are screening embryos for diseases. An American company called Genomic Prediction is currently offering an “Embryo Health Score Test” to reduce the genetic risk for polygenic diseases, disorders whose risk is influenced by many genes.

The next step will be tinkering with genes to make potential offspring athletic, smart, blue-eyed, healthier or taller.

IVF is expensive. According to the White House, the cost ranges from US$12,000 to $25,000 per cycle – and multiple cycles may be needed to get pregnant. But Trump has promised to foot the bill. “Under the Trump administration your government will pay or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with I.V.F. treatment,” he said during the campaign.

So what are the chances that Trump’s cost-cutting czar Elon Musk will protest that free IVF is a money sink that the US government cannot afford?

They could be very low. Of Mr Musk’s 13 children by several women, at least five are IVF babies.

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Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

Image credits: Bigstock

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mrscracker commented 2025-02-27 03:35:52 +1100

I always appreciate your civil & charitable remarks Mr. Banos & Mr. Lee. Thank you for that. Courtesy in conversation is harder to find these days & I think we learn much more that way than in shouting at each other or trying to score points.
Tim Lee commented 2025-02-26 08:13:45 +1100

Thank you, Mrs Cracker and Juan!

In a comment on Michael Cook’s “new sheriff in town”, I compared Vance to JFK and said that he is “smart, charismatic and ambitious… at the forefront of a crossroads in history. He can play a pivotal role in turning around decades of decadence in the West”.

I do see that Vance deserves a chance to show what he can do in his limited executive role and that I may have been too hard on him when so many Catholics are in the dark on aspects of Catholic bioethics. It is early days and I look to Vance making an enduring impact through his integrity and fortitude.
mrscracker commented 2025-02-26 08:03:25 +1100

Best regards to you too, Mr. Banos.
Juan Llor Baños commented 2025-02-26 05:09:59 +1100

Mrs. Cracker, I totally agree with you. Mr. Vance is doing something to improve the foundations of ethics, and more specifically medical ethics, with actions, not empty words, which has not been done in the USA or the Western world for fifty decades. Catholics and non-Catholics had better take note. Best regards.
mrscracker commented 2025-02-26 04:32:37 +1100

Yes, Mr. Lee we should each have fortitude but you know, in our govt. the typical role of a VP hasn’t a great deal of authority except in very specific situations .
I believe as a fairly recent convert Mr. Vance has a way to go as far as understanding Catholic teaching on marriage & family. When so few lifelong Catholics understand those teachings it seems fair to give JD Vance a bit of slack in our expectations. And at the end of the day he wasn’t elected to the Catholic hierarchy but simply as a secular public servant.
Emberson Fedders commented 2025-02-25 11:27:27 +1100

JD Vance does not have the spine to stand up to Trump. No one in the Republican does, come to think of it.
Tim Lee commented 2025-02-25 07:32:58 +1100

He is, Mrs Cracker. What Vance needs more than knowledge is fortitude under pressure not to upset Trump’s apple cart. He needs to be his own man and find creative ways to mitigate his boss’ excesses. If not, he may fall by the wayside like some of Trump’s acolytes in his previous term.
mrscracker commented 2025-02-25 06:06:53 +1100

Hello Mr. Lee. I believe JD Vance is on a learning curve also.
You have blessed day!
Tim Lee commented 2025-02-23 07:53:01 +1100

Fair enough, Mrs Cracker. My own deficit of integrity hasn’t gone unnoticed by those who know me well. :)

In a recent interview on Fox News, Vance talked about his boss’ genius in seeking a wide range of views before making important decisions. I hope Trump listens to him on this issue. As an intellectual Catholic, he needs to make up for what Trump lacks as a Christian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzJYt4bWRuI
James Dougall commented 2025-02-23 07:16:03 +1100

The article fails to mention that the IVF procedure necessarily comprises the destruction of embryos. In other words, abortions.
mrscracker commented 2025-02-23 04:58:34 +1100

I agree with you Mr. Banos.
Many Catholics are not educated about IVF. If Catholics are so uninformed about a teaching of their own faith, why do we expect Donald Trump to be any different?
Emberson Fedders commented 2025-02-22 20:42:09 +1100

And as the MAGA plan is the exact opposite of the correct thinking of Mr Bunyan, we can expect to see the US fertility rate continue to decline.
Paul Bunyan commented 2025-02-22 10:21:56 +1100

They’re desperate to increase the birth rate. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to do this unless they tackle the cost of living crisis. And they won’t be able to do that unless they tax corporatiojns and the wealthy.
Tim Lee commented 2025-02-22 07:49:49 +1100

Trump is suffering from a deficit of integrity that threatens to undo the good he has done on issues such as abortion. Life is either sacred, beyond wilful tinkering with technology, or it is not. It’s a chasm of a fine line between medical intervention to restore health or save life and technology to remake life in our own image. If we condone commodifying life through IVF, how do we argue against those who say that a fetus is not a human being?
Julian Cheslow commented 2025-02-22 06:12:18 +1100

I do get the critique of surrogacy being a industry that can lead to exploitation, and honestly I wish completely artificial wombs were a thing so it was never necessary, but perhaps until then there can be more strict regulation/oversight of it(this would also be helpful in reducing mistakes).

But I just want to point out families don’t have to fit the nuclear mold to be valid, or more importantly healthy for children to grow up in.
Juan Llor Baños commented 2025-02-22 00:04:19 +1100

I think that Trump is not suffering in this case from a purely politically interested intention in signing the IVF authorization. He is simply suffering from a general lack of training in the world of medical ethics. Unfortunately, this lack of training makes IVF seem correct and acceptable to a large number of those who call themselves Catholics. It is not a decision of political interest, it is a severe lack of ethical training!!
Michael Cook published this page in The Latest 2025-02-21 17:24:59 +1100