Enshrining Abortion via IVF

United States senators Ted Cruz and Katie Britt want you to think you can have your cake and eat it too. Cruz and Britt have introduced a bill last week that would withhold Medicare dollars from states that prohibit in vitro fertilization (IVF). The bill would essentially make IVF a federal right.

The recent focus on IVF stems from a ruling in February by the Alabama Supreme Court. The case involved an IVF clinic in Alabama that mistakenly discarded a couple’s frozen embryos. The couple sued, and the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against the clinic on the premise that IVF embryos have a right to life. 

The ruling led to an accusation in the media and among elected Democrats that Republicans want to prohibit IVF. The Republican-dominated Alabama state legislature acted swiftly to dispel that claim by enshrining a right to IVF into state law. 

Amid the uproar, self-described pro-life politicians have linked support for IVF with their pro-life position. Advocating for their bill, Cruz and Britt wrote last week that they will “protect both life and IVF.”

Speaker Mike Johnson was more explicit: “I believe in the sanctity of every human life…and because of that, I support IVF and its availability.” 

Claims like these raise the issue of whether being pro-IVF aligns with being pro-life. It is our view that the same reasons that lead one to oppose abortion should impel one to oppose IVF. Indeed, the philosophy that underpins the moral and legal case for abortion dovetails with the philosophy that underpins the case for IVF. 

Let’s consider three manifestations. 

First, both abortion and IVF treat human life in a callous, haphazard way. Consider what IVF clinicians call “embryo grading.” With IVF, lab technicians fertilize a woman’s eggs with a man’s sperm in a petri dish, resulting in new life in the form of new embryos. Some of the embryos created are then implanted in the woman seeking to become pregnant. 

Before that happens, however, IVF clinicians perform a visual inspection of the embryos and grade them based on quality. Embryos with a higher grade are typically implanted while lower-grade embryos are not. 

The process may seem mundane, but if one believes life begins at conception—as pro-life politicians like Cruz, Britt, and Johnson have all argued—then the embryos involved in IVF procedures are human beings. Grading them based on their appearance and deciding their fate accordingly amounts to an early-stage form of eugenics.

Eugenics is inherently arbitrary, so it’s not surprising that, as one IVF clinic admits, embryo grading is “highly subjective” and “even lower-graded embryos can sometimes result in successful pregnancies.” 

That haphazard approach to human life is further reflected in what happens to embryos that are not implanted. The Heritage Foundation’s Emma Waters writes that “[c]linics often create a surplus of embryonic children to test them for the ‘best’ genetic profile or to select embryos based on their sex or physical features. They routinely destroy unwanted embryos and may freeze some for later use.” 

A second link between abortion and IVF is that they share the same false anthropology. Abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide give humans the final say over the end of life. IVF gives humans the final say over the beginning of life. 

Children born because of IVF are precious, and the world is better because they exist. But their innocence and intrinsic dignity does not imply the moral goodness of the circumstances surrounding their conception. 

The desire to have children is laudatory, but sometimes that desire can be instantiated in wrong ways. It is easy to see the goodness in a man’s desire to get married and have children. But we can likewise easily admit that pressuring a woman to date and marry is the wrong way to pursue that desire. 

Cruz, Britt, and other pro-life politicians make a compelling emotional case for IVF, citing the friends and family they know that would not have been able to have children otherwise.

It is true that without IVF some couples would not be able to have their own biological children. 

This is a sad reality, and we do not wish to diminish the anguish of infertility. 

At the same time, as Pope Francis stated earlier this year, “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.” IVF distorts what it means for a child to be a gift by instrumentalizing the creation of new life. IVF clinicians attempt to play God in the process. 

A third link between abortion and IVF is that both confound the purpose of sex. Both abortion and IVF do this by severing the tie between sex and reproduction. 

Abortion, along with what St. John Paul II dubbed the “contraceptive mentality,” promotes the view that the telos (i.e., purpose) of sex is not the generation of new life but the enjoyment of sexual acts cut off from the possibility of life. If sex unwittingly results in pregnancy, abortion provides a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sex, thus, becomes in people’s minds primarily for the sake of pleasure. The consequence is to demote the value of sex—sex becomes just like eating, sleeping, scratching an itch. 

IVF likewise demotes the value of sex by dispensing with its necessity in procreation. Instead of the generation of new life following the loving embrace of husband and wife, new life is concocted by laboratory workers after an act of masturbation by the man, alone, in a dark room with dirty magazines. 

Through the legal protection of abortion, people assimilate the view that sex can be almost entirely disconnected from pregnancy because a fetus can simply be dispensed with if an unwanted pregnancy arises. Through the legal protection of IVF, people assimilate the view that babies can be created without sex—that, in fact, sex is dispensable. It can and often should be replaced by laboratory technicians looking to make a buck. 

In proposing a federal right to IVF, Cruz and Britt endanger the lives of human beings in their earliest stages, intimate a false anthropology, and distort the meaning of sex. Still, their bill would have another pernicious effect: it would make it more difficult to enact laws protecting the unborn.  In proposing a federal right to IVF, Cruz and Britt endanger the lives of human beings in their earliest stages, intimate a false anthropology, and distort the meaning of sex.Tweet This

Law has a powerful ability to shape public opinion as it shapes people’s sense of right and wrong. Many Americans believe that abortion is a sacrosanct right precisely because it was recognized as such by law for nearly half a century—deemed a constitutional right by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. 

Enshrining IVF as a federal right will allow the philosophy behind both abortion and IVF to seep further into the minds of Americans. Thus, the long-run effect of a federal right to IVF is a federal right to abortion. Cruz and Britt’s bill, thus, might be viewed as enshrining not only IVF but abortion too. 

Given the political dynamics, it may not be prudent for politicians to actively push for outright IVF bans at the state level. Nevertheless, politicians who purport to be pro-life should think hard about whether their proactive support for IVF can be reconciled with their opposition to abortion. 

We cannot be both pro-life and pro-IVF.

[Photo: Senators Katie Britt (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) (Credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images)]