IVF Won’t MAGA

IVF won’t make America great again. 

President Trump’s executive order on in vitro fertilization is a relic from Democrats’ attempts to make IVF into a campaign issue during the 2024 election. Republicans panicked, and Trump promised a government IVF mandate. And so his new order demands a plan to “protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments.” 

This is political malpractice. Though most voters approve of IVF, those who oppose it are concentrated in the GOP. This issue divides the Republican coalition without bringing in new voters; swing voters are not going to vote based on IVF.

An IVF mandate would also be bad policy, establishing expensive new entitlements that will be readily susceptible to waste and fraud. Giving the unregulated fertility industry a blank check that the rest of us will have to pay for is a terrible idea.

And though IVF is promoted as a means for couples struggling with infertility to have children, a government IVF mandate will encourage and subsidize the creation of many more motherless and fatherless children. It would allow any adult to order up babies on demand via IVF and surrogacy, thereby creating a government mandate and subsidy for de facto human trafficking and — because, unlike adoption, there is no screening of those ordering babies in this way — abuse.

This dystopian scenario, in which a man with a predatory history could, with government backing and subsidy, order up a baby like any other consumer good, highlights the truth that IVF does not treat infertility. IVF does nothing to heal the underlying conditions causing fertility problems. Rather, it is a technological workaround that turns babies into lab-created products and, when surrogacy is used, women into rented incubators. This unnatural medicalization is everything that Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again agenda claim to oppose. 

Thus, it was jarring when RFK Jr. argued for Trump’s executive order by tweeting, “Some 13% of women are having difficulty getting pregnant or carrying their pregnancy to term.” That is indeed a problem, but IVF does not heal any of these women. If we really want to help those having difficulty conceiving, we should focus on addressing the medical causes of infertility, rather than pushing women into the cash cow of IVF, which does nothing to heal their bodies and which, despite its promises, has a high failure rate, particularly for older women.

Kennedy also tried to sell the executive order by claiming, “This is an important strategy for addressing the national crisis on plummeting fertility rates.” But IVF does not raise fertility rates, and it may even lower them by instilling a false sense of security that encourages people to put off having children. The declining birthrate is indeed a crisis, but if we want more babies, we need to encourage people to get married younger and stay married. There are pro-family policy changes that would help, such as making family housing more affordable by making it easier to build, but mandating IVF subsidies is not among them. 

Furthermore, it is not the federal government’s business to mandate coverage or subsidies for IVF. Conservatives who spent years fighting against Obamacare and its unconstitutional and expensive mandates should stand by their principles, and President Trump would be wise to avoid mandates that raise health insurance premiums. 

Indeed, if government is going to concern itself with IVF, it should start by reining in the industry rather than writing it a blank check. Big Fertility is an underregulated mess, with America having far fewer limits than the rest of the world. 

Big Fertility isn’t the good guy. There is an abundance of horror stories regarding their mistakes and malfeasance. For example, The Washington Post recently reported on the case of Georgia resident Krystena Murray, who is suing because: 

In December 2023, Murray delivered a healthy baby boy. But she also knew immediately that it didn’t develop from one of her own lab-fertilized eggs. The baby was Black, while Murray and her sperm donor are both white. She says she later learned doctors had transferred another patient’s embryo instead of her own. Regardless, Murray resolved to raise the child. But after reporting the mix-up to the fertility clinic, she says, its staff tracked down and notified the baby’s biological parents. They demanded custody, Murray said, and she gave up the 5-month-old boy to avoid a legal fight she couldn’t win.

The IVF facility reportedly has no idea where Murray’s own embryos are. Last year, The New York Times covered a similar story, in which an IVF mix-up left two families giving birth to and raising each other’s genetic children. When the mistake was finally realized months later, they had to endure the anguish of swapping them back.

These are not isolated incidents. Fertility facilities are frequently guilty of errors and even deliberate wrongdoing, and according to The Washington Post, most of these mistakes are never reported. Sometimes, as in the cases above, they use the wrong embryos. Other times they use the wrong sperm or egg; DNA testing has revealed that many fertility doctors have used their own sperm to artificially inseminate patients. And IVF facilities often destroy embryos they are supposed to preserve; the Alabama Supreme Court decision that triggered this whole panic was prompted by a lawsuit against a facility that had negligently allowed a couple’s embryos to be destroyed.

IVF also frequently destroys human lives intentionally. The fertility industry has created millions of “excess” human embryos, many of which are routinely discarded, with more than a million more indefinitely frozen. The pro-life movement cannot proclaim that human life is valuable from conception onward while also supporting the IVF industry.

The practice of IVF is also deliberately eugenic. In something out of a science fiction dystopia, facilities have even started using AI to select between embryos, and designer children seem increasingly within technological reach. Sex selection is already normal in the United States. A same-sex couple even sued after the woman whose womb they rented gave birth to a daughter rather than the son they wanted. 

These evils illustrate why subsidizing the IVF industry is incompatible with making America either great or healthy again. But despite the failures and wrongs of IVF in practice, there is a persistent quest, even among conservative Christian pro-lifers, to establish an ethical form of IVF. The promise of providing children to those who are barren is hard to resist. Infertility can be anguishing because love longs to see itself instantiated through the begetting of new life with the beloved.

But 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.

It is precisely because children are precious that it matters how we have them. We should not deliberately dehumanize children to have them, for the method requires denying the essence of the good that we seek through it. Christians in particular know we must be willing to suffer and deny ourselves for what is right. We must proclaim and practice a way of life that does not dehumanize children by treating them as objects to be manufactured and acquired. 

And we should all recognize that a giant government handout to an unaccountable and often evil industry is not the way to make America great again.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.