WASHINGTON (OSV News) – President Donald Trump announced a policy proposal Oct. 16 to increase access to in vitro fertilization, including issuing guidance urging employers to offer fertility benefits directly to their employees. However, the U.S bishops expressed concern the following day, saying that while they support ethical efforts to address infertility, they “strongly reject” the effort to promote IVF.
Trump previously campaigned on requiring the government or insurance companies to pay for IVF, which is a form of fertility treatment opposed by the Catholic Church on the grounds that it often involves the destruction of human embryos, among other moral and ethical concerns.
“In the Trump administration, we want to make it easier for all couples to have babies, raise children and start the families they always dreamed about,” Trump said in comments at the White House.
Trump also announced what he called a deal to lower the cost of Gonal-F, a fertility medication used in IVF cycles.
As a candidate for president in 2024, Trump pledged his administration would protect access to IVF but would have either the government or insurance companies cover the costly treatment. His pledge came after a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that found that frozen embryos qualified as children under the state law’s wrongful death law. The legal ruling, while limited in scope, aligned more with the position the Catholic Church has staked out against the legalization of IVF. Alabama lawmakers later enacted legal protections for IVF.
“I’m asking all employers to make these new fertility benefit options available to their employees immediately,” Trump said. “The initiatives I’ve just announced are the boldest and most significant actions ever taken by any president to bring the miracle of life into more American homes.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a joint bishops’ statement Oct. 17, which expressed gratitude for “aspects” of the president’s policies that intend to include ethical forms of “restorative reproductive medicine” the Church can support.
But the bishops also made clear they “strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF,” pointing out the artificial fertility procedure involves the freezing and the destruction of excess embryos – human beings at the embryonic stage of their development – in the effort to bring about a live birth.
“Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God. Without diminishing the dignity of people born through IVF, we must recognize that children have a right to be born of a natural and exclusive act of married love, rather than a business’s technological intervention,” Bishop Robert E. Barron, chairman of the USCCB's Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth; Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, chairman of the Committee for Religious Liberty; and Bishop Daniel E. Thomas, chairman of its Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said in an Oct. 17 statement. “And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.”
The bishops said they will “continue to review these new policies, and look forward to engaging further with the administration and Congress, always proclaiming the sanctity of life and of marriage.”
Doug Wilson, CEO of the Catholic Benefits Association, told OSV News Oct. 16 the group “is grateful that President Trump has decided not to mandate coverage of IVF, given the concerns that Catholic employers have about the destruction of unborn children in the IVF process and its removal of conception from the union of spouses.”
“We will remain vigilant in monitoring this effort, as similar proposed initiatives have failed to uphold the rights of religious employers,” he said.
Both the USCCB and CBA previously fought long-running battles with the federal government for Catholic employers’ exemptions to an Affordable Care Act mandate requiring employers to provide coverage for contraception, sterilization or abortifacient drugs in their employee health plans.
In February, Trump signed an executive order that aimed “to ensure reliable access to IVF treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.” That order sought policy recommendations within 90 days, a deadline that passed months prior to Trump’s Oct. 16 announcement, previously raising questions about whether he would follow through on his campaign pledge.
In a statement, the March for Life said the organization “appreciates that President Trump has heard and is responding to so many Americans who dream of becoming parents.”
“The desire for parenthood is natural and good. Children are a blessing. Life is a gift. The White House's announcement today is rooted in these core truths,” the statement said. “Here’s what else we know to be true: every human life is precious – no matter the circumstances. We continue to encourage any federal government policymaking surrounding IVF to prioritize protecting human life in its earliest stages and to fully align with basic standards of medical ethics.”
It added, “We welcome the administration’s commitment to making groundbreaking advancements in restorative reproductive medicine more accessible and available to American women. RRM aims to resolve rather than ignore underlying medical issues, increasing health and wellness while also restoring fertility, and responding to the beautiful desire for children while avoiding any collateral loss of human life.”
In comments at the White House event, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Catholic and member of the Kennedy political family, said Trump was “doing God’s work” by “giving millions of Americans a chance to have babies.”
Asked by a reporter about those who have religious objections to IVF, Trump replied, “I don’t know about the views of that. I’m just looking to do something because – pro-life, I think this is very pro-life. This is – you can’t get more pro-life than this.”
IVF is among the fertility treatments to which the Catholic Church objects in its teaching on the sanctity of human life.
The 1987 document from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith known as “Donum Vitae” or “The Gift of Life,” states the Church opposes IVF and related practices, including gestational surrogacy, in part because “the connection between in vitro fertilization and the voluntary destruction of human embryos occurs too often.”
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 238,126 patients underwent IVF treatment in 2021, resulting in 112,088 clinical pregnancies and 91,906 live births.
Multiple embryos are typically created for use in an IVF cycle. The number of human embryos currently created each year by IVF in the U.S. runs into the hundreds of thousands with the majority typically lost through what fertility clinics call “IVF attrition.”
CDC data shows 45 percent of embryo transfers on average result in a single live birth for women under 35, and the average diminishes to 23 percent for women under 40.
Issued by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, “Donum Vitae” named the “right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death” and “the child’s right to be conceived, brought into the world and brought up by his parents” as behind the Church’s moral objections to those practices.
It emphasized, “The political authority consequently cannot give approval to the calling of human beings into existence through procedures which would expose them to those very grave risks noted previously.”
“The possible recognition by positive law and the political authorities of techniques of artificial transmission of life and the experimentation connected with it would widen the breach already opened by the legalization of abortion,” it added.
(Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington.)
