On May 19, President Donald Trump’s Domestic Policy Council is expected to submit policy recommendations to improve access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and reduce the cost.
“My Administration recognizes the importance of family formation, and as a Nation, our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,” states President Donald Trump’s executive order (EO) of February 18. “In vitro fertilization (IVF) offers hope to men and women experiencing fertility challenges.”
The EO states that to improve access to and make IVF treatment more affordable, the policy should ease “unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens.” On the campaign trail, Trump said he supported mandated insurance coverage of IVF.
The Domestic Policy Council will have challenging issues to consider, says medical ethicist Mark Blocher, CEO of Christian Healthcare Centers and author of Missional Medicine—Restoring the Soul of Medicine.
“Since IVF is largely unregulated, it is an industry that is ripe for abuses: economic exploitation, troublesome experimentation with human embryos, and the moral confluence of the virtue of childbearing with the evil of eugenics and abortion,” said Blocher.
‘Area of Medicine Unlike Any Other’
Trump’s executive order makes the mistake of seeing childlessness as a medical condition, says Blocher.
“Like too much of government involvement in health care, it focuses too much on cost and not enough on outcomes, quality,” said Blocher. “Making IVF more affordable doesn’t make it more ethical.”
IVF is an area of medicine unlike any other, wrote Carter Snead and Yuval Levin in The Hill on February 24
“This is the only medical context in which the treatment consists in the creation of a new human being,” wrote Snead and Levin. “In vitro fertilization allows procreation to be fractured into its component parts, creating an array of multiple potentially vulnerable people—genetic parents, gestational parents, rearing parents, and, of course, the children conceived and born with its aid.”
IVF raises health and safety red flags,” write Snead and Levin.
“The CDC itself has identified an association with the use of in vitro and birth defects and other maladies,” wrote Snead and Levin. “In vitro fertilization has a well-known heightened incidence of preterm births with attendant serious risks for mothers and children. Yet there are still no federally funded longitudinal studies on the health and well-being of in-vitro mothers and babies.”
Blocher says on the bioethical side of IVF, the council will have to consider many nuances such as “personhood of human embryos, substantial embryo loss common in IVF, cryopreservation of embryos, selective pregnancy reduction, preimplantation genetic diagnosing, sex selection, surrogacy.”
The EO omitted a key issue. “It doesn’t address why fertility rates have declined for several decades,” said Blocher.
AnneMarie Schieber ([email protected]) is the managing editor of Health Care News.
AnneMarie Schieber is a research fellow at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News, Heartland’s monthly newspaper for health care reform.
