The bishops who chair key committees for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) this week denounced the Trump Administration’s new initiatives expanding access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) measures, warning that IVF is immoral.
“Though we are grateful that aspects of the Administration’s policies announced Thursday intend to include comprehensive and holistic restorative reproductive medicine, which can help ethically to address infertility and its underlying causes, we strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF that instead freeze or destroy precious human beings and treat them like property,” Bishops Robert Barron, Kevin Rhoades, and Daniel Thomas said in the joint Oct. 17 USCCB statement.
Bishop Barron chairs the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, Bishop Rhoades chairs the Committee for Religious Liberty, and Bishop Thomas chairs the Pro-Life Activities Committee. Bishop Barron also serves on the White House-established Religious Liberty Commission, which President Donald Trump appointed him to serve on in May.
The bishops emphasized Church teaching that IVF violates children’s rights; creating human beings in laboratories is wrong.
“Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God,” the bishops stated. “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. And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.”
CatholicVote reported Oct. 16 that President Donald Trump announced a partnership with a pharmaceutical company to lower the costs of IVF, and he said the Administration is taking steps to expand access to insurance coverage for IVF.
“We will continue to review these new policies,” the bishops concluded in their Oct. 17 statement, “and look forward to engaging further with the Administration and Congress, always proclaiming the sanctity of life and of marriage.”
Other pro-life leaders have also strongly denounced the pro-IVF push, warning that the majority of embryonic humans created in the process are frozen indefinitely or discarded.
“The longing for a child is holy, but a child can never be the product of a laboratory process that treats life as disposable,” CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt said in an Oct. 16 statement. “We urge President Trump to reconsider this approach and instead fully commit to the far better path already hinted at in his policy: addressing the root causes of infertility. Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM) offers real, ethical care by diagnosing and healing the underlying conditions that prevent conception, rather than bypassing the body through an expensive, low-success, morally unacceptable procedure like IVF.”