Trump Issues Self-Defeating IVF Announcement

Pro-lifers are aghast at the recent statements of former President Trump. He implied in an interview that he might vote for Amendment 4 in Florida, codifying abortion till birth, because “six weeks is too short”. He told Fox News the next day that he would vote against the Amendment, but still holds his objections to Florida’s six-week law. Then he announced an official platform of providing government-funded IVF to all Americans, funding it with tax dollars. His idea was then expanded to potentially force insurance companies to cover IVF, still forcing everyone to pay for what they may be opposed to.

Some people are ill-informed about IVF, seeing it merely as a compassionate aid to those who are struggling to conceive. In truth, it is a grave evil, which is why the Catholic Church, some Protestant denominations, and plenty of those who have studied the act explicitly condemn it. With IVF, fully-fertilized embryos are frozen (which is opposed to human dignity), then several are typically implanted into the woman. If more than are wanted successfully implant, the “extra” children are killed in what is euphemistically referred to as “selective reduction”. Likewise, the remaining frozen embryos are either killed, sold for medical experimentation/research, or simply abandoned to their indeterminate frozen limbo.

Moreover, a child has the right to be born as a product of the loving union of his mother and father’s embrace. Being produced in a lab by a lab technician is an affront to human dignity, reducing the beginning of a child’s life to a science experiment. It is categorically less than what each child is owed.

Forcing unwilling people to take part in this evil by assigning their tax dollars is itself reprehensible. It’s just as wrong as when such taxpayer funds are directed toward abortion—which hitherto has been a Democrat platform that Republicans vehemently oppose. Hence, Trump’s campaign, which surely announced this new policy to try to gain voters, has alienated a huge chunk of his existing supporters. He gained support for his pro-life efforts during his first term, and now estranged the same bloc. Those who defend the announcement with the assertion that he is “just trying to get elected” ignore that this policy undermines that goal.

If this is a misguided attempt at fixing plummeting birth rates in the USA, it missed the mark. Continuing to abort a million children each year and then funding IVF so we can kill more of them when women in their 40s want to take extraordinary measures cannot be the best strategy. Always remember: IVF kills more children than it creates.

JD Vance, Trump’s Vice Presidential choice, is a practicing Catholic who, as a Catholic, should be able to understand and evaluate this issue properly. It’s concerning that we have (apparently) gained yet another public Catholic who is unwilling to defend the Faith, and is instead engaged in public scandal. With Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, we had plenty of such dominant cases. The Catholic Church is not ambiguous on this issue, and neither should Catholics be.

A child is not a piece of property that is owed to those who desire one, nor a commodity that can be killed if he appears at an inconvenient time. Both IVF and abortion treat children as such. If we want a culture that is worth defending, it must come with the acknowledgment of children as the gifts from God that they are. We could (and should) take the approach of Hungary, which has successfully caused birth rates to rise. In Hungary, abortion has been made difficult to access, and healthy families are financially encouraged with tax breaks (and credits), helping to alleviate the costs associated with raising children.

Fixing the birth rate crisis in the West means fixing the way that we see children, and human beings more broadly. The policies that are currently being suggested would worsen the underlying issues, rather than providing a remedy.