President Donald Trump and his team want Americans to have more babies. In fact, that was the prevailing narrative when the White House announced new guidance last week explicitly designed to “increase access” to in vitro fertilization.
“We want to make it easier for all couples to have babies, raise children, and start the families they’ve always dreamed about,” Trump said.
The means the administration are promoting to seemingly reach that end — lowering the prices of IVF and other assisted reproductive technology drugs as well as offering a new employer fertility insurance benefit — however are morally, ethically, and functionally faulty.
Family building between a married man and woman, as I’ve written many times before, is a noble and necessary feat. In fact, now more than ever, the U.S. could use a birth rate boost.
That boost, however, cannot and should not come at the expense of 93 to 97 percent of the test tube babies who will not make it to birth or even a womb. There’s no denying that expanding IVF not only does little to fix the West’s fertility woes, but also kills more unborn babies than abortion every year.
On the contrary, Big Fertility, whose biggest seller is IVF, routinely prioritizes profit over people. The industry offers anyone and everyone, regardless of their relationship status or sexuality, the opportunity to buy their way into parenthood without regard for children’s natural rights. The consequences of this commodification include normalized eugenics, forced orphanhood, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, more than a million indefinitely frozen embryos, millions more discarded embryos, and deliberate ignorance of women’s health solutions.
It’s important to note that while the administration’s announcement may not be perfect, it is far friendlier to the pro-life crowd than Trump’s initial policy proposals.
In August 2024, the then-presidential candidate declared he would force American taxpayers to foot the bill for the procedure that predicates itself on the routine destruction of human life. Even before that, in April 2024, Trump called for the creation of children by whatever outsourced reproductive means necessary in each and every state.
By August 2025, the White House halted its plans to subsidize IVF. The hold made sense in light of Trump’s claims to support pro-life, pro-family, and pro-Make America Healthy Again principles. The administration’s promotion of IVF, however, continued.
Trump’s latest plan does technically leave the door open for employers to cover restorative reproductive medicine, which is not only more cost-effective than IVF but also yields a historically higher success rate. The White House’s focus, however, is still not on treating the root cause of infertility.
In the succinct words of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Ryan Anderson: “Trump’s IVF Policy Could Be Worse, But It’s Still Bad.”
As EPPC fellow Patrick Brown wrote in his coverage of the announcement, “the guidance suggests pro-lifers still have friends in high places.” He duly noted, however, that there is still plenty of room to make “the broader case that IVF as often practiced in the U.S. will not, actually, raise birth rates, will open the door further to eugenics, and, ultimately, will usher in the greater instrumentalization of human life.”
Trump confirmed the need for that kind of clear communication on Thursday. In response to a question posed by former Federalist Culture Editor turned UnHerd D.C. Correspondent Emily Jashinsky about his message to pro-life conservatives who “have religious objections to IVF,” Trump enthusiastically declared that his plan is “very pro-life.”
“You can’t get more pro-life than this!” he continued.
Except that’s not true. On its face, more babies and lowered drug prices seem like good causes. The truth, however, is IVF simply won’t MAGA.
The White House’s plan, which hyperfixates on Big Pharma’s inflation of fertility drug costs, completely fails to mention or even consider the bigger cost that results from endorsing the unregulated creation and destruction of human life in its smallest form. The emotional and physical toll IVF wreaks on the people who pay for it also gets little to no airtime.
Yes, the country needs more babies. Yes, Big Pharma’s grip on drug prices is out of control. But Trump giving the fertility industry’s biggest moneymaker a political boost does Americans no favors. In fact, it sentences some of them to death before they even get a chance at life outside of a cryopreservation tank.
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