Pro-life advocates decry Trump executive order expanding IVF access
null / Credit: Inna Dodor/Shutterstock Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Feb 18, 2025 / 18:05 pm (CNA).
President Donald Trump frustrated pro-life activists Tuesday afternoon with an executive order that directs the United States Domestic Policy Council to examine ways to lower costs for in vitro fertilization (IVF) and expand access to the procedure.
“I’ve been saying we’re going to do what we have to do,” Trump said in a news conference after signing the order. “I think the women and families [and] husbands are very appreciative of it.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X that the order “directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments.”
The executive order instructs the council to provide the president with a list of policy recommendations within the next 90 days.
The move to expand access to IVF and lower its costs fulfills one of Trump’s campaign promises but puts him at odds with many members of the pro-life community who oppose IVF because the process has destroyed millions of human embryonic lives.
IVF is a fertility treatment opposed by the Catholic Church in which doctors fuse sperm and eggs to create human embryos and implant them in the mother’s womb, which deviates from the natural procreative process. To maximize efficiency, doctors create excess human embryos and routinely destroy undesired embryos.
“Only 7% of human embryos created via IVF will result in a live birth,” Live Action President Lila Rose said in a post on X after the White House announcement.
“93% of these lives are frozen indefinitely, miscarried, or aborted,” she added. “Over 1,000,000 embryos are frozen in the U.S. IVF is NOT pro-life.”
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins, in a post on X, urged Trump to “please stop and study the IVF industry, which is disturbing as it preys on desperate families, kills humans in the embryonic stage, and promotes eugenics.”
Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher and professor at Pasadena City College, said in a series of posts on X that “there should be no funding for it whatsoever, and no Trump supporter who would fail vigorously to resist such a move can claim to be genuinely pro-life.”
“Catholics and other pro-lifers: Ask yourself what you would say and do if a Democrat had done this,” Feser said. “If you will not say and do the same thing when Trump does it, then you are a hypocrite whose loyalty to your party has trumped loyalty to your religion and to the natural law.”
Many Republican lawmakers aggressively embraced IVF in February 2024 after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling to protect certain legal rights for human embryos caused a public backlash.
In March 2024, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed legislation that granted IVF clinics immunity when they cause the deaths of human embryos. After signing the bill, the governor asserted that IVF is “pro-life” and helps build a “culture of life” without mentioning the number of human embryos destroyed through the process.
