Champions of assisted reproductive technology (ART) have long defended the fertility industry and its mass destruction and abandonment of countless embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles.
When the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling last year declaring “all unborn children,” including embryos that have yet to be implanted, are considered humans under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, corporate media jumped to defend the already unregulated Big Fertility industry.
NBC News was one of many corporate media outlets that fearmongered about the implications of the opinion on IVF. Even though the ruling did not nitpick fertility facilities or their operations, NBC News stoked worries that ART facilitators and participants should “fearfully proceed with IVF after Alabama court rules embryos are children.”
“It’s not clear when fertility clinics might feel comfortable enough to resume normal operations — or whether patients who intended to discard embryos will have to continue paying storage fees in the interim,” another NBC News article stated.
Just one year later, NBC News’ worries that Big Fertility’s freedom to destroy, discard, or indefinitely freeze unlimited “leftover” embryos was threatened transformed into fears that when it comes to “IVF nightmares, patients have few protections.”
According to an NBC News analysis published this week, “more than 300 lawsuits filed from 2019 to 2024 alleging that embryos, eggs or sperm had been lost, destroyed or swapped.”
“The suits were filed against fertility clinics or companies involved in the IVF process across 19 states, and the majority — at least 260 — involved allegations of product or equipment failures,” the article states, noting that IVF “isn’t governed by the same regulations that hold other medical practitioners accountable for mistakes or safety violations.”
Press outlets such as NBC News do not bat an eye at the millions of embryos, some of which were likely viable, that are deliberately destroyed due to unreliable genetic testing or sentenced to frigid freezer fates every year.
In fact, in many cases, corporate media defend the serial creation and destruction of test tube babies as necessary, good, and even trivial as long as the fertility facility and people who commissioned those little lives are on board with throwing them out.
They apply the same twisted logic to their promotion of abortion. After all, the baby-making and baby-taking industries both hold that life is only valuable and worth protection if that life is wanted.
When it comes to the accidental destruction of embryos that IVF customers desperately desire to use, however, NBC News changes its tune. Suddenly, the microscopic humans once deemed disposable have intrinsic value that should come with a right to legal recourse simply because the people who commissioned them did not sanction their harm or elimination.
NBC News is aware of how hypocritical this position is, which is why the outlet concludes its analysis with a warning that “Reproductive rights advocates also have a reason to be wary of increased IVF regulations.”
“They fear amplifying debates about whether embryos are considered babies under the law,” the article states.
Hinting at the need for legal recourse against fertility facilities that mishandle test tube babies without acknowledging the personhood of those embryos is nearly impossible because it requires the law to pick and choose when innocent life is worthy of protection.
The lack of ART oversight and regulation is certainly concerning and worth a conversation. But that conversation can’t come without first recognizing the sanctity of all human life, beginning at the moment at conception, no matter the circumstances of that conception — something NBC News is clearly unwilling to do.
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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