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CV NEWS FEED // The in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry needs more regulation, not less, the president of a Christian outreach group recently argued in critique of President Donald Trump’s Feb. 18 executive order aiming to expand access to IVF.
“In the end, IVF in America is not about fertility. It’s an industry, a radically under-regulated selling of goods and services,” John Stonestreet, the president of Colson Center wrote. Though some who engage in IVF practices are well-intentioned, the industry, which profits by selling embryonic humans, has become “under-regulated, unethical, and dehumanizing,” he argued.
In the Feb. 25 article for Colson Center’s publication Breakpoint, Stonestreet detailed how IVF results in the creation of many embryonic humans, most of whom are either destroyed, used for medical research, or frozen indefinitely. In the US alone, millions of embryonic humans are frozen each year.
Due to this massive destruction of unborn children, Stonestreet argued that IVF is not only anti-life, but anti-fertility.
“Though born children do result,” he wrote, “the way IVF is overwhelmingly and almost universally practiced means that far more lives are taken in the process than survive.”
IVF doctors will destroy embryos that are considered “undesirable,” based on everything from the embryonic child’s gender to potential health conditions, Stonestreet pointed out.
“Advocates of IVF can call this widely accepted and practiced step whatever they want,” he wrote, “but the best word is eugenics.”
IVF commodifies human life, treating human lives as a good or service, he said. One sign of this is that in divorce custody battles, frozen embryonic humans are often considered property.
Trump’s executive order focuses on efficiency in the practice of IVF, Stonestreet noted. The executive order states that the assistant to the president for domestic policy must, within 90 days, recommend policies to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce costs for the procedures.
Stonestreet argued that the order’s emphasis on making IVF more “efficient” further commodifies children’s lives.
“It’s far more efficient to collect as many eggs and create as many embryos as possible,” Stonestreet wrote. “And that leads to more lives lost annually than in all the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics combined.”
The practical implications of the executive order are unknown, Stonestreet noted. The vague order might be Trump’s follow-up to the pro-IVF comments he made on the campaign trail to counter Democrat arguments, and nothing further, or Trump might be paving the way for the IVF industry’s expansion.
Catholic leaders, such as Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, have also decried the executive order, as CatholicVote previously reported.
Bishop Burbidge wrote in his Feb. 19 statement that the 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.”
