If you support life and family values, you might oppose IVF

On Monday, Sens. Ted Cruz and Katie Britt unveiled their IVF Protection Act to ensure “IVF is fully protected at the federal level.” The bill would make states “ineligible to receive Medicaid funding if they have enacted an outright ban on access to IVF.”

Cruz touts the bill as being pro-life, as IVF offers “miraculous hope to millions of Americans, and it has given families across the country the gift of children.” Britt insists that “IVF is pro-family” and a “pathway to parenthood.”

In reality, IVF, and the Britt-Cruz attempt to protect it, victimizes children — both in terms of their right to life as well as their fundamental right to be known and loved by their mother and father. This bill is neither pro-life nor pro-family.

IVF Violates Children’s Right to Life

Despite their Wall Street Journal promise that this bill will “Protect Both Life and IVF,” Cruz dodged Annmarie Hordern’s “is an IVF embryo considered life at conception?” question. Instead, the senator assures us that “there is unanimity” in support for IVF among all 100 senators.

His deflection was necessary. Answering “yes, life begins at conception” would kill his bill faster than an embryo of the wrong sex at a fertility facility.

That’s because only a fraction of the tiny lives created through IVF will be born alive. Most will be purposely destroyed. According to a recent Heritage Foundation report, only 3 to 7 percent of embryonic children will make it through the IVF process alive. The vast majority of these tiny humans will be deemed nonviable or sub-optimal and destroyed, donated to research, perpetually frozen, won’t survive the freeze, the thaw, or the transfer, or be rejected for having the wrong sex, hair color, or eye color. As I often point out, the baby-making fertility industry destroys more little lives annually than the baby-taking abortion industry.

Cruz explains that his IVF Protection Act advances a “right to IVF … enabling people to become parents.” Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s Access to Family Building Act set out to do exactly that earlier this year. Her bill “establish[ed] a statutory right for an individual to access, without prohibition or unreasonable limitation or interference, assisted reproductive technology services, such as IVF.”

Both Cruz and Duckworth agree that “IVF is a miracle.” One wonders why Cruz didn’t sign on to the Democrat’s parallel legislation, especially given he and Britt hope their bill will receive “bipartisan support.” It could be that Duckworth’s bill made explicit what Cruz seeks to obscure — that abortion and IVF are two sides of the same “reproductive rights” coin. Both of which treat children as objects of rights, not subjects of rights. Both of which destroy hundreds of thousands of tiny humans every year.

Cruz and Britt are giving a pass to an industry that would rather forgo business in states that insist unborn children have a right to life than modify their business model to protect those children.

For those of us who actually believe that life begins at conception, we must equally challenge the baby-taking industry and the baby-making industry. If there’s a way to “Protect Both Life and IVF” we have yet to find it.

IVF Violates Children’s Right to Their Mother and Father

In their Bloomberg interview, Britt assures us that her bill is pro-family. But she also believes that “every parent across the country who wants to bring life into this world and may be struggling with infertility or others” (emphasis added) should have “the certainty” of IVF access.

Here, Britt and Cruz do the heavy lifting for Democrats seeking to make mothers and fathers optional in the family. The left has made multiple attempts to redefine infertility, mandate IVF access for single and same-sex couples, and insist that subsidized access to #BigFertility is the next front in LGBT equality. A “right to parenthood” via a “right to IVF” is a critical step in the overhaul of the nuclear family, the only family form that unites a child’s mother and father for life.

You see, when you’re creating a baby in glass — in vitro — there’s no need to only use the gametes of the child’s own mother and father. It’s just as easy to swap in a third party’s egg or sperm, and thereby intentionally separate a child from one or both genetic parents at the moment of conception — parents who are statistically the safest, most connected to, most protective of, and most invested in the child.

While we don’t know how many children are made motherless and fatherless through IVF (because #BigFertility operates virtually regulation-free), estimates range between 30,000 and 60,000 per year. We do know that there are entire international organizations that rely on IVF to create intentionally motherless children. Those motherless and fatherless children will disproportionately struggle with identity issues. Turns out, it’s very hard to answer the question “Who am I?” when you cannot answer the question, “Whose am I?”

If Cruz and Britt define “family” like Democrats do — as whatever arrangements reflect the romantic or sexual desires of adults — then sure, IVF is “pro-family.” But if you actually believe that children need, deserve, and have a right to their mother and father, then IVF is often anti-family. It is a precision tool wielded by a money-hungry industry to destroy children’s natural familial bonds.

You Cannot Be Pro-life and Protect IVF

Cruz and Britt got a lot wrong with their IVF Protection Act, chief among those wrongs are children — what they deserve, when they come to be, and to whom they belong. IVF is a threat to kids — to their dignity and worth as well as to their parental bonds.

Any politician advancing legislation to “protect IVF” absent explicit language identifying that children have a right to life from the moment of conception and prohibiting the use of third-party sperm or egg or womb are neither pro-life nor pro-family nor pro-child. They are pro-politics. And they forfeit any credibility with regard to future policies that advance protection for the unborn or the importance of mothers and fathers.

You can be pro-life and pro-family, or you can be pro-IVF. But you can’t be both.