On Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump frustrated activists providing by signing an executive order that orders the United States Internal Policy Council to examine ways to reduce the costs of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and expand access to the procedure.
“I’ve been saying that we are going to do what we have to do,” Trump said at a press conference after signing the order. “I think women and families (Y) husbands thank you very much,” he added.
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said In an X post That the document orders “recommendations of political directives to protect access to IVF and aggressively reduce the costs of pocket and health plan for such treatments.”
The Executive Order instructs the Council to provide the President with a list of policy recommendations within the next 90 days.
The measure of expanding access to IVF and reducing its costs meets one of Trump’s campaign promises, but disagrees with many members of the provident community who oppose this process that has destroyed millions of human embryonic lives.
IVF is a fertility treatment to which the Catholic Church opposes. In this doctors fuse spermes and ovules to create human embryos that are implanted in the mother’s uterus, which deviates from the natural procreative process.
In addition, to maximize efficiency, doctors create surplus human embryos and routinely destroy unwanted embryos.
“Only 7% of human embryos created through IVF will result in a living birth,” said Live Action President Lila Rose, In an X post After the announcement of the White House.
“93% of these lives freeze indefinitely, are lost or aborted,” he added. “More than 1,000,000 embryos are frozen in the United States. The IVF is not provident, ”he said.
The president of Students for life of America, Kristan Hawkins, In an X posthe urged Trump to “stop and study the IVF industry, which is disturbing because she takes advantage of desperate families, kills human beings in the embryonic stage and promotes eugenesis.”
Edward Fester, a Catholic philosopher and professor of Pasadena City College, said in a series of publications in x that “there should be no financing for it, and no Trump supporter who does not resist vigorously to such a measure can affirm that it is genuinely providant.”
“Catholics and other provida: ask what they would say and do if a Democrat had done this,” Fester wrote. “If they will not say or do the same when Trump does, then they are hypocrites whose loyalty to his party has triumphed on loyalty to their religion and natural law,” he said.
Many Republican legislators aggressively supported the IVF in February 2024 after a ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court to protect certain legal rights of human embryos caused a public reaction.
In March 2024, the governor of Alabama, Republican Kay Ivey, signed a law that granted immunity to IVF clinics when they caused the death of human embryos.
After signing the bill, the governor said that IVF is “provida” and helps build a “culture of life”, not to mention the amount of human embryos destroyed during the process.
Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in CNA.
Tyler Arnold
Tyler Arnold is a reporter of the National Catholic Register. He previously worked at The Center Square and has published in various media, including The Associated Press, National Review, The American Conservative and The Federalist.