Trump’s IVF Policy Could Be Worse, But It’s Still Bad

By: Ryan T. Anderson, originally published October 17, 2025, FirstThings.com

The Trump administration’s IVF policy unveiled on Thursday is perhaps the least bad that we could have hoped for. The details are still being promulgated, but, as White House officials explained it, there will be no IVF mandate or direct government subsidies for IVF. Those who feared something akin to the Obama contraception mandate or taxpayer funding of abortion can breathe a sigh of relief. There will be no direct religious liberty or conscience violations, nor implications for taxpayer funding.

But least bad is still bad. 

The entire thrust of the policy is to make something unethical (IVF) more widely practiced. Such a policy is itself unethical. So while Americans won’t be required to violate their conscience, our public policy will promote IVF more now than ever before.

None of this is necessarily to cast aspersions on those pushing for IVF. President Trump, in his remarks at the White House on Thursday, showed compassion for the many Americans who struggle with infertility, and he clearly has real affection for children. He wants to be a pro-baby, pro-family president. His motivations are good.

But there is a stark contrast between these motivations and the ethical challenges with IVF—challenges that most Americans know little, if anything, about. And that contrast was on vivid display during the White House policy announcement. Sen. Katie Britt called President Trump the most pro-IVF president in history. An IVF industry representative praised the president for the new policy, showing crony capitalism is alive and well. RFK Jr. told President Trump that Trump “was doing God’s work” in promoting IVF. Falsehoods were repeated about the Alabama court ruling that initiated this most-recent wave of IVF frenzy. And no attention at all was paid to the ethical concerns with IVF, or to the medical reality that IVF doesn’t actually treat infertility.

When a reporter asked President Trump what his response was to pro-lifers with concerns, he seemed unaware that there were concerns: “I don’t know about the views of that . . . I think this is very pro-life. You can’t get more pro-life than this.” But IVF as practiced today entails massive killing and freezing of embryonic human beings. IVF doesn’t treat underlying causes of infertility and doesn’t respect the dignity of the human person in his or her creation, where people should be begotten, not made. 

Many couples experiencing infertility ache to start a family. Doctors don’t always impress on them the human costs of IVF. For one birth, doctors might create ten to twenty embryos, transfer several of the “most promising,” freeze the rest, and if more than one implants, abort the others. So the typical IVF cycle results in multiple dead and frozen embryos. And unlike in European nations, there are almost no laws in America regulating how many embryos can be created or destroyed, or how frozen embryonic human beings can be treated.

To some, this casual disregard is no accident, because IVF itself treats children as products of technical manufacture. It thus fails to respect the equal dignity of human beings in their very origins. Children are to be welcomed as the fruit of an act of marital love. Relating to a child instead as a producer relates to a product is the seed of all the abuses of the IVF industry—the casual creation and destruction of “spares,” the filtering out of “defectives,” the selection for sex and other specs (such as eye or hair color), the commodification of (often poor) women’s bodies as incubators. 

The fundamental moral concerns about IVF are not sectarian. While today the Catholic Church most prominently teaches that IVF itself is wrong, the three most prominent moral thinkers who opposed IVF’s introduction in the 1970s and ’80s were non-Catholic: the University of Chicago’s Leon Kass (Jewish), Princeton’s Paul Ramsey (Methodist), and Oxford’s Oliver O’Donovan (Anglican). The arguments stand or fall on the merits, not the religious identity (or lack thereof) of those making them. 

Alas, the White House event displayed no sensitivity to—or even awareness of—these concerns. But it wasn’t an outlier. Most Americans are unaware of these concerns. Indeed, truth be told, most church-attending Christians are blissfully unaware—because the Church has done such a poor job of teaching these truths. 

Which makes the White House’s concern to not burden the consciences of the Americans who do oppose IVF all the more laudable. I personally met with many high-ranking White House officials to express these concerns, and I know I wasn’t the only one. I appreciate that the president’s team engaged widely throughout this policy process and not only heard but responded to at least some of the concerns expressed. That said, instead of making IVF more affordable and accessible, the Trump administration needs to take steps to address our current state of unregulated embryo fabricating, freezing, and destroying. Embryonic human beings deserve the law’s protection.

The bulk of the Trump IVF policy entails two main features: lowering the prices on IVF and other fertility treatments by lowering the costs of key drugs through Most Favored Nation (MFN) pricing, and creating a new optional employer fertility insurance benefit. One aspect of this insurance benefit that was not highlighted during the Oval Office announcement but was explained to me by White House staff deserves mention: The new optional employer fertility insurance benefit is fully customizable, so that an employer could opt to offer a benefit only for ethical fertility treatments like restorative reproductive medicine. Indeed, restorative reproductive medicine is both ethically and medically superior to IVF, as it actually addresses the root causes of infertility, potentially allowing couples to conceive naturally through marital love instead of via technical manipulation in a petri dish. As the White House rolls out the details about this optional employer-sponsored fertility benefit, I know I’ll be looking into offering an ethical plan at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

All of which is to say that it could have been worse, and there are some real bright spots. But it’s ultimately a misguided policy. It highlights the reality that there is a lot of work yet to be done for those of us who believe in sound reproductive ethics.

Ryan T. Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His most recent book is “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”

Image: FirstThings.com/archive/article-Ryan-Anderson.