Trump orders expanded access to IVF, a practice contrary to Catholic teaching

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that aims to expand access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a practice the Catholic Church warns is enormously destructive to embryonic human life.

A form of artificial reproductive technology, IVF unites a woman's eggs and a man's sperm outside of their respective bodies in a laboratory setting, with one or more embryonic children selected for implantation in the woman's uterus, and the remaining embryonic children either destroyed or frozen indefinitely.

Trump's Feb. 18 executive order "directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments," according to a statement issued that same day by the White House.

Costs for IVF, which are "often not fully covered by health insurance," can range "from $12,000 to $25,000 per cycle" and "multiple cycles may be needed to get pregnant," said the White House in its statement.

The executive order delivers on "promises for American families" made by Trump, while seeking to address declining fertility rates in the U.S., said the White House.

That drop is part of a global downturn in fertility rates, with 2024 rates at 2.2 births per woman, down from approximately 5 in the 1960s and 3.3 in 1990, according to the United Nations' World Fertility Report 2024.

The White House statement quoted Trump as saying, "We want more babies, to put it very nicely."

However pro-family demographers put cold water on an IVF policy leading to a baby boom when Trump floated the idea on the 2024 campaign trail.

Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies told OSV News in September that people tend to delay fertility with more reproductive technology options. 

"So you freeze your eggs when you're 31, and you say, 'Well, I don't need to be in any particular rush, because at the end of the day, I've got all the time in the world,'" he said. But given some of the inherent difficulties in births to older mothers, that's not always true, meaning "these two factors more or less cancel out."

"So the net result is that there are no extra babies," he said.

IVF treatments are opposed by the Catholic Church because they frequently involve the destruction of human embryos, in addition to other ethical and moral issues.

Out of more than 413,000 artificial reproductive technology cycles recorded in 2021, only 112,088 resulted in pregnancy. Of those, only 97,128 babies were successfully born, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Multiple embryos are typically created for use in an IVF cycle, so 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 on their websites explain as "IVF attrition."