{"id":34217,"date":"2025-05-28T15:39:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-28T15:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=34217"},"modified":"2025-05-28T15:39:18","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T15:39:18","slug":"get-ready-ivf-confusion-is-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/get-ready-ivf-confusion-is-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Ready. IVF Confusion is Coming."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: Emily Geiger and Rebecca Carlson, originally published May 27, 2025, Equal Rights Institute<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On February 18, 2025, President Trump signed the executive order \u201cExpanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization,\u201d setting off a firestorm of comments, criticisms, and confusion among pro-life and pro-choice people alike. \u201cWe want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder, you know that\u2026that includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every state in America,\u201d\u00a0Trump said<\/a>\u00a0on the campaign trail last spring. \u201cI strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious, little, beautiful baby.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not hard to see why\u00a0Americans overwhelmingly believe access to IVF is a good thing<\/a>. I mean, Trump is right; IVF means that more couples can have more babies!\u00a0What\u2019s the problem with that?!\u00a0<\/em>So pro-choice people (and even some pro-life people) are incredibly confused why Trump\u2019s Executive Order just 30 days into his presidency didn\u2019t make us pop the champagne.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By us, I mean Rebecca, Emily, and our awesome\u00a0ERI Affiliate Groups<\/a>\u00a0who researched and brainstormed how to effectively respond to the bewildered looks we\u2019ve been getting on college campuses. Rebecca and I co-wrote this article, but really the credit goes to our awesome Affiliate Group members. The pro-choice train of thought we all thought through together goes something like \u201cIsn\u2019t more babies exactly what pro-lifers want? But they don\u2019t support IVF?! Oh, so it really IS just about controlling women\u2019s bodies and sex lives after all\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/em>Here\u2019s what we found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Executive Order<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Rule number one. If a pro-choice person (or anyone for that matter) asks you about a thing or makes claims about a thing, go read the actual thing for yourself.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n

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During his campaign,\u00a0Trump promised<\/a>\u00a0public funding or mandated insurance coverage for IVF, so I\u2019ll be honest; when I first heard about Trump\u2019s executive order, I (and I think a lot of other people, at least based on the pandemonium in my social media feed) automatically assumed he was making that happen. But,\u00a0as I discovered upon reading it<\/a>, this executive order accomplishes neither. To be clear,\u00a0the IVF executive order actually accomplishes nothing.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the important part: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWithin 90 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re currently 98 days out from the Executive Order\u2019s publishing, so it\u2019s quite likely IVF will be back in the news in the very near future when Trump\u2019s team reviews those policy recommendations and presumably picks one or more to try implementing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\u2026What\u2019s the Problem?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Ok, so the executive order\u2019s first steps are moving slower than we initially thought. But still, why shouldn\u2019t pro-lifers (and everyone!) be excited about it? Regardless of your stance on abortion, if people who want to get pregnant but are struggling with infertility have a way to be able to get pregnant, that\u2019s great! Here\u2019s the thing: the end doesn\u2019t justify the means.<\/strong> The end, or goal, of IVF is awesome\u2014helping people who are struggling with infertility. The means, how it gets to the goal, is the problem: long story short, it involves killing prenatal humans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people know that the goal of IVF is helping people get pregnant. A lot of people don\u2019t know\u00a0how<\/a>\u00a0it\u00a0accomplishes<\/a>\u00a0that. Eggs are retrieved from the woman\u2019s body, semen is retrieved from the man\u2019s body, and the eggs are fertilized in a lab. Just like when the fertilization process happens in a woman\u2019s body, as soon as fertilization is complete, you now have a human being\u2014a living organism of the species\u00a0homo sapiens.\u00a0<\/em>The embryo grows for 3-5 days in a lab, and is then implanted in the woman\u2019s uterus.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the catch: because the process is very expensive and has a relatively low success rate, doctors typically create more embryos than they plan to implant in the woman\u2019s uterus. The remaining embryos, after growing alongside their siblings for 3-5 days, can be frozen for possible later use, donated to other couples (embryo adoption), donated to be used for research, or discarded\u2014that is, killed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In theory, there is a way to do IVF that doesn\u2019t involve the likelihood of ending up with extra embryos that are then discarded: you can create a smaller number of embryos, and transfer all the embryos who survive into the woman\u2019s uterus, likely over the course of multiple cycles. But because a single cycle of IVF is so expensive, and because the failure rate is so high, that is prohibitively expensive and rarely practiced. In fact, in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court\u2019s ruling that frozen embryos can be considered children, some Alabama IVF clinics stopped operations entirely, and two pro-IVF fertility doctors published an interview saying that \u201cdiscarding embryos is inherent to the IVF process<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are several pieces of the typical IVF process that we argue are\u00a0obvious human rights violations<\/strong>, assuming we start from the premise that the\u00a0prenatal humans involved are people like you and me<\/a>\u00a0with an equal right to be protected from violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Since even embryos placed in the woman\u2019s uterus are far from guaranteed to survive implantation and the rest of pregnancy,\u00a065% of the time doctors will place multiple embryos in the woman\u2019s uterus<\/a>, in order to increase the chances that at least one embryo will successfully implant. But doctors don\u2019t want multiple embryos to successfully implant, because multiple pregnancies (twins, triplets, etc) have higher risks for both mom and babies. So if multiple embryos\u00a0do\u00a0<\/em>successfully implant, doctors will sometimes \u201cselectively reduce<\/a>\u201d\u2014that is, abort\u2014all but one or two of the embryos.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Selective reduction is less common than it used to be because the technology that allows doctors to determine which embryos are likeliest to implant has improved, therefore the odds of a singleton embryo successfully implanting have increased. That\u2019s a double-edged sword, though\u2014it means fewer humans are being killed in utero by selective reduction, but more humans are being killed (or frozen and very likely killed later) before the implantation process even begins.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    It\u2019s worth noting that when doctors freeze or discard (kill) \u201cextra\u201d humans in a lab, or selectively reduce (kill) \u201cextra\u201d humans in a woman\u2019s uterus, they\u2019re not flipping a coin to pick which ones to keep. They always assess the \u201cquality\u201d of the embryos\u2014the perceived likelihood that they will be able to successfully implant in the woman\u2019s uterus\u2014and choose embryos that are very likely to be able to implant over other embryos, including embryos that are still quite likely, but a little less likely, to be able to implant.\u00a0That\u2019s called eugenics.\u00a0<\/strong>Worse, doctors will often (about 60% of the time<\/a>) wait a few extra days to implant so that they have time to do initial genetic testing and weed out embryos who test positive for genetic diseases or chromosomal abnormalities. It\u2019s even legal in the US to select which embryos to implant based on their sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Killing people\u2014or freezing them cryogenically to maybe use them at some unspecified point in the future or maybe eventually kill them if you don\u2019t find a use for them\u2014 at all is really bad, but choosing which people to kill based on who\u2019s weaker or has less desired traits adds an extra layer of dystopian dehumanization. And on a practical dialogue level, the eugenics concern can be helpful to bring up with pro-choice people because it\u2019s often common ground: even if someone is comfortable with the idea of killing very young prenatal humans, they\u2019re typically very uncomfortable with the idea of eugenics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Here are some additional concerns some pro-lifers may have about the IVF process:<\/p>\n\n\n\n