Adoption Is The Pro-Life Antidote To The IVF Onslaught

By now, many people have weighed in on President Donald Trump’s new executive order that will review ways to subsidize in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments for American women struggling to conceive a child. As it stands, these treatments are expensive, often requiring multiple attempts at fertilization, each round costing several thousands of dollars.

While Trump and the majority of Americans believe that IVF is pro-life and pro-family since it helps couples have children, many detractors decry the major ethical problems associated with it. At The Federalist, Jordan Boyd recently pointed out that IVF results in a huge loss of life: “Approximately 93 to 97 percent of the little lives created in labs via IVF won’t ever make it to the womb and certainly not birth.” If life starts at conception, and an embryo is a human life, then this means that countless lives are terminated through IVF.

Catholic chemist and philosopher Dr. Stacy Trasancos explained the grave injustice of IVF since it separates procreation from the marital act and violates the dignity of the child. She asserts that “all children have a right to be conceived in love by a married mother and father.” Even when done with the best intentions by a married couple, IVF nonetheless commodifies children, making them objects to accommodate adult desires. As for the unwanted extra children, they are thrown away.

Nathanael Blake recently echoed this point, again at The Federalist: “The good of having children cannot be pursued through evil means, and it is impossible to separate IVF from its intrinsic dehumanization. IVF, by its nature, treats people as objects to be ordered, manufactured, and delivered rather than as persons to be begotten in love.”

Nevertheless, those who support IVF will cite the political futility of arguing against it. After all, for most people (70 percent, to be exact), the millions of lives extinguished through IVF are more an abstraction than a concrete crisis requiring the use of political capital. It’s better to focus on winnable issues.

Others will frame IVF in strictly pro-natalist terms. Because the birthrates of most of the developed world are below replacement rates, governments should facilitate and promote human reproduction in any way possible. This is clearly the position of men like Elon Musk, who had more than half of his thirteen children through IVF.

Fortunately, most people can easily see how unethical and disturbing this reasoning is. Taken to its logical conclusion, the pro-natalist case for IVF would justify a true Handmaid’s Tale scenario in which women are impregnated through IVF to meet some national demographic benchmark. And if it’s popular (and insanely profitable), the pro-life conservatives will be told to stop complaining and “take the win.”

Unfortunately, good or bad arguments don’t really matter because IVF is not so much a policy, but a symptom of a larger problem. The reason so many American women today struggle with conceiving children is that they are starting their families much later, leading stressful lives, and are generally in worse health. When most first-time mothers were domestic housewives in their early 20s, having children was relatively easy. But when a growing number of first-time mothers are in their mid-40s, work a full-time job, and have likely been on hormonal birth control and other prescriptions for decades, they will likely need to use IVF.

Moreover, these mothers will also likely want to have an escape hatch like abortion if the baby suffers from ailments and disabilities, which tends to happen more with older mothers. This is why otherwise conservative suburban women push back against political leaders wanting to ban abortion yet seem to be fine with 15-week abortion limits. Many of them want enough time to see if their own unborn babies will develop normally or not.

Once this is understood, Trump’s stances on abortion and IVF make complete sense. As with many other issues, he is simply responding to what most Americans want, regardless of the logical or ethical merits.

So where does this leave the pro-lifers who want to protect the unborn from abortion and IVF but find themselves outnumbered? In addition to educating Americans, they need to offer a solution to the problem of so many couples wanting to have children but not being able to do so.

This means seriously reconsidering adoption and foster care. Right now, it’s easier to abort a child than to put him up for adoption, and it will soon become much easier and cheaper to use IVF treatments than to adopt a child in need of a home.

Rather than Americans pressuring their political leaders to subsidize IVF and/or abortion, they should apply this collective pressure to reforming broken adoption policies. In too many states, adopting a child is prohibitively expensive and so mired in regulations and obstacles that many couples will go overseas to third-world countries to adopt. Even the supposedly unwanted children stuck in the hellacious foster care system are kept from being taken in by a loving household because their criminal drug-addicted parents might possibly have a change of heart once they clean themselves up and get a job years down the road.

And this is to say nothing of adoption agencies that discriminate against Christian conservative couples who refuse to affirm a child’s “queer identity” and hope to raise him or her in the faith, or Christian nonprofits being highjacked by leftist radicals to push LGBT adoptive parenting.

In light of this, Trump should consider issuing executive orders that remove these barriers to adoption and expedite the process. This would meet the needs of couples who want to have children but can’t and couples who want to have children but are afraid of the complications, as well as couples who are expecting children but don’t want them.

More importantly, it would meet the needs of love-starved children who would otherwise be aborted, neglected, or exploited as objects. They deserve better.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.