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Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo on Thursday vetoed a bill that would have mandated insurance coverage of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state – a major victory for a coalition of pro-life organizations and leaders who had warned him against allowing the bill to become law.
Nevada Right to Life and CatholicVote organized the coalition against the bill, delivering a letter to Lombardo urging him to issue the veto. The letter’s signers included Nevada Right to Life Executive Director Melissa Clement, who delivered the letter to the governor’s office, CatholicVote Vice President Joshua Mercer, Democrats for Life President Kristen Day, and Bishop Daniel Mueggenborg of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Reno.
Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, said the bill would have given the IVF industry “carte blanche to act recklessly.”
“Let’s not forget that this bill is an unfunded mandate which will cost the state tens of millions of dollars per year and increase healthcare premiums for Nevadans,” Valentine told The Daily Wire ahead of the governor’s veto. “It was passed in literally the 11th hour along party lines. A Republican governor should not be signing a bill like this, and we hope he will not.”
In his veto announcement, Lombardo noted that the bill’s IVF coverage mandate would be cumbersome to the state’s healthcare system, imposing IVF without any funding in place to back the new requirement. “Without dedicated and sustainable funding this mandate is fiscally impossible considering the current posture of the state’s budget, specifically in terms of Medicaid resources,” he wrote.
“We approach the issue of IVF from varying perspectives,” stated the pro-life coalition’s letter to Lombardo this week. “While we are broadly supportive of the general principle of helping families struggling with infertility to conceive, IVF is bioethically and economically problematic.”
“Healthcare must be sensibly regulated,” the argued. “IVF involves surgically removing human eggs and injecting them with sperm in a laboratory. Because of the mixed success of creating a healthy embryo through this method, practitioners typically create 8-10 human embryos per cycle – far more than the couple intends to carry to term.”
The controversial practice also often involves implanting an excess number of embryos in the uterus, then “selectively aborting” the extras, the letter noted.
“A recent study estimated that for every human embryo created through IVF and carried to term, nine are left behind,” the letter pointed out. “The remaining human embryos are usually either destroyed or left to languish in freezers, sometimes for decades, with no clear laws or regulations on what to do with them.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) numbers indicate that “at least 1.5 million human embryos created through IVF are destroyed every year,” the letter stated. “The IVF industry currently operates in a wild west, with little to no regulation or restraint on its activities. It is already legal in Nevada. The bill would allow IVF practitioners to operate with complete impunity and hinder the state’s ability to enact health and safety regulations….”
The letter concluded by pointing out the rashness of the measure in financial terms, while also calling for other approaches to helping families who struggle to conceive.
“Even those who are untroubled by the bioethical hazards cannot deny that IVF mandates present tremendous fiscal challenges to state governments,” the pro-life signatories pointed out, calling the bill’s IVF provision “an unfunded mandate.”
“Nevada could address infertility in far less expensive and fraught ways by fostering restorative reproductive medicine to address the root causes of infertility,” they argued, “promoting education on fertility awareness-based methods; and reducing costs and eliminating legal barriers to adoption.”
Readers can find the full letter to Gov. Lombardo here.