Former President Donald Trump wants to force American taxpayers to foot the bill for a procedure that predicates itself on the routine destruction of human life via in vitro fertilization (IVF). His insistence that “all costs” associated with the procedure responsible for the abandonment of more than a million embryos will be covered through either “government” or insurance mandates, however, only fuels Democrat efforts to link assisted reproductive technology (ART) with their extreme abortion agenda.
“We want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Trump said during his Michigan rally on Thursday, where he also promised to allow “new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes.”
Trump’s desire for Americans to create children and build families is not a bad one. In fact, it’s honorable, especially in the face of our nation’s floundering fertility rates. But the ends do not always justify the means.
Crossing The Rubicon?
It’s unclear exactly what kind of qualifications and parameters come with Trump’s sweeping subsidization of IVF. His emphasis on “all costs,” however, suggests the procedure should be available to anyone and everyone, including accused pedophiles, people who use purchased sperm and eggs to create motherless and fatherless children, and those who rent another woman’s womb for the duration of gestation on someone else’s dime.
Every year, fertility specialists across the U.S. harvest eggs and marry them to sperm in Petri dishes hundreds of thousands of times. Each of these hundreds of thousands of cycles results in the creation of several embryos, bringing the total number of babies conceived via IVF well into the hundreds of thousands if not millions.
Approximately 93 to 97 percent of those test tube babies commissioned for creation, however, won’t survive thanks to premature discard and abandonment in cryogenic freezers. Those who do make it through eugenics-esque genetic testing could die during the thawing process required for implantation in the womb.
Nearly half of U.S. adults, 46 percent, agree with modern science, medicine, many states, and even pro-abortion biologists that life begins at conception so “a fertilized egg is a person with the same rights as a pregnant woman.”
Forcing Americans, especially the significant number of those with moral objections to IVF, to bankroll the unfettered actions of the multibillion-dollar fertility industry is not a solution, it’s a problem. In fact, it not only carries many of the same problems that came with former President Barack Obama’s contraceptive mandate but also many more.
It’s true, as Trump said, that IVF is “expensive.” Promising an industry that prioritizes profit over people, adults’ selfish desires over children’s natural rights, quick fixes over long-term women’s health solutions, desirable traits above all, forced orphanhood, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, and making human existence transactional, however, only guarantees those unethical and immoral consequences will continue unchecked.
Trump’s plan also paves the way for Democrat activists, who have explicitly linked their radical attempts to enshrine abortion through birth in state constitutions and federal law to IVF, to continue taking advantage of the ART debate to advance their political agenda.
Yet, the conditions that encouraged Trump to play right into Democrats’ hands on IVF were not created by him.
A Thorn In The Flesh
There is and has been a gaping hole in pro-life policy when it comes to ART for many years. It wasn’t until the Alabama Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the sanctity of life in its most vulnerable form that the national pro-life movement’s inability to act on its word became especially apparent.
Standing up for unborn babies, no matter the circumstances of their conception, is on par with the pro-life movement’s long-held belief that humans are endowed with natural rights at conception.
Yet, GOP politicians and national pro-lifers alike have let Democrats goad them into a life-centered fight that distracts them from the task at hand. Many of them have taken soft or even sympathetic positions on reproductive technology. Others have become so preoccupied with Trump’s agenda that they’ve failed to gain ground in the battle to protect life on the state level.
Meanwhile, Democrats, with help from their allies in the corporate media, have taken advantage of pro-lifers’ inconsistency on IVF to make messaging and policy gains that benefit their abortion extremism.
It’s the pro-life movement’s job to set the tone for the fight for life. Yet, a significant number of the movement’s biggest political champions are endorsing a procedure that no doubt kills more life than it creates. That’s a problem that would have been better remedied by prevention than intervention.
Now, committed pro-lifers are fighting an uphill battle against some of their biggest allies to explain to voters duped by Democrats’ deceptive narrative-setting and corporate media’s twisted polls why promoting and subsidizing IVF is wholly incompatible with protecting unborn babies or successfully curbing the industries that profit from the destruction of life.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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