President Trump’s In Vitro Fertilization Executive Order

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Statement of Bishop Michael F. Burbidge on President Trump’s In Vitro Fertilization Executive Order:

President Trump’s executive order “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization” is a disappointing and unnecessary action. While the Church proclaims the dignity of all persons and affirms the truth that every child is a gift from God, regardless of the circumstances of their conception, the Church also observes that IVF involves serious moral injustices.

“Expanding access” to IVF as described in this executive order is likely to unjustly promote IVF in a way that will result in the abandonment or death of millions of embryonic human persons, involve all taxpayers with a serious moral injustice, provide federal subsidies for already lucrative IVF businesses, and ignore the risks to parents and children of America’s broadly unregulated IVF industry.

In January, I released a pastoral letter on “The Christian Family, In Vitro Fertilization, and Heroic Witness to True Love” meant to encourage and teach all people of goodwill. It is a natural human longing to have a child. The Christian vision of human love and procreation affirms the good of marital love, the centrality of husband and wife, and the goodness of a variety of life-affirming fertility treatments for those experiencing fertility challenges. The Church encourages fertility treatment approaches like NaProTechnology, which hold the promise of restoring fertility and respect human life.

“The most obvious moral difficulty of IVF,” I write in my pastoral letter, is “that despite giving rise to new life it also destroys many others, is a reality knowable by human reason. For every one of the more than 12 million children born by means of IVF since 1978, there are many tens of millions more missing brothers and sisters who have been either deliberately destroyed, experimented upon, or frozen in liquid nitrogen and denied their natural right to the fullness of their development. Every successful IVF procedure results in a living child with many missing siblings.”

In practice and principle, IVF is incompatible with the president’s evident support for the good of human life and his desire to encourage family formation. There are still many life-affirming and positive actions that President Trump and federal and state lawmakers may consider in the future to encourage and support family formation and stability. The Church recognizes that the state has a moral responsibility to support the good of the family. Elected officials should consider concrete ways to encourage earlier marriage and family formation, establish programs to address direct pregnancy and childbirth-related expenses that may act as a barrier to the growth of families, and expand coverage for life-affirming and restorative fertility care. We must work for building up families in ways which do not entail the destruction of human life.
https://www.arlingtondiocese.org/2025/0 ... ive-order/

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