In a Fact Sheet (full text) released October 16, the White House announced several initiatives designed to increase access to, and reduce the cost of, in-vitro fertilization. These include agreements with pharmaceutical companies to reduce the price of existing fertility drugs and to speed up FDA approval of lower priced alternatives. The initiatives also include new methods for employers to offer benefit packages that would pay for a wide range of fertility-related services, from those that address the root causes of infertility to IVF. The U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops responded to the White House's announcements in an October 17 press release, saying:
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.
Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God. 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.
We will continue to review these new policies and look forward to engaging further with the Administration and Congress, always proclaiming the sanctity of life and of marriage.
First Things in an article by Ryan Anderson analyzes this White House initiative, saying in part:
The Trump administration’s IVF policy unveiled on Thursday is perhaps the least bad that we could have hoped for.... [T]here 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.
