Playing both sides

On Mother’s Day, the White House launched Moms.gov, an impressive and comprehensive pregnancy resource site. Strikingly absent was any explicit information about the Trump administration’s push for greater IVF access. That doesn’t mean the administration has given up that cause, but it is clearly aware of growing criticism from pro-lifers on the issue.

So, despite promising to expand IVF coverage through workplace insurance and lower costs via executive order last year, Moms.gov deliberately avoids the topic. The site, however, includes a section on genetic testing—a tool commonly used to screen embryos for viability before deciding which to implant.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. forgot he wasn’t supposed to say the quiet part out loud. At Sunday’s unveiling, he called the new website a “huge win for the MAHA movement and the pro-life movement,” describing it as “one-stop shopping for IVF, for prenatal care, for postnatal care, for nutrition, for baby formula.”

Only someone who isn’t pro-life would call the manufacturing of children by any means necessary a win for “the movement.” As pro-life bioethics teacher and writer Charlie Camosy noted on X, calling “one-stop shopping for IVF” a win for the pro-life movement is like calling a website advocating factory farming a victory for PETA.

Through TrumpRX, the site offers help with conditions like ovulatory dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, and insulin resistance. It’s encouraging to see the administration advocate for solutions that restore the body’s natural ability to conceive. Simultaneously pushing to expand IVF is both harmful and hypocritical.

Unexplained infertility is rising, and much of it probably traces back to the toxic environments Americans live in—chemicals in food, clothing, medicines, and personal care products. Studies link endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics, food packaging, and non-stick cookware to impaired semen quality, decreased ovarian reserve, and hormonal disruption. Expanding IVF access does nothing to address these root causes—it just routes people around them.

According to the Washington Post, one White House advisor pushed back against any approach that “prioritizes holistic health,” insisting “every responsible fertility physician” already recommends lifestyle changes before advancing to IVF. It’s worth noting that this advisor is also the lead doctor at a Texas fertility clinic, something the Post didn’t disclose.

It’s ironic that the self-styled king of MAHA—so distinguished by his vaccine skepticism and disdain for red dye 40—is so eager to pump women full of synthetic hormones. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has acknowledged a possible increased risk of invasive ovarian and thyroid cancers associated with fertility treatment, and long-term data on fertility drugs remains thin. A Push for expanded access—as though the safety is settled science—is unethical. 

But the deeper problem with IVF is what the procedure requires. Every baby born through IVF is almost always one of multiple embryos, and the others either didn’t make it or now exist indefinitely in a freezer. Traditional IVF, which covers the vast majority of treatments, is not pro-life.

Conservative estimates put the number of frozen embryos in storage at 1.2 million–most without a pathway to birth.  Only the “best” are chosen for implantation; the rest are frozen in time.

Parents know those embryos are their children. Pro-life or not, most feel uncomfortable destroying them, so they don’t. Storage fees accumulate. Monthly invoices arrive for parents to cover the rent for their frozen children. Many eventually stop paying, leaving storage companies in legal limbo.

Though Trump has pledged to ease “regulatory burdens” on IVF, that’s precisely the wrong direction. Big Fertility is already one of the least regulated industries in medicine. It’s a space where sex offenders can acquire children through IVF and surrogacy, where embryo mix-ups mean a woman can carry and deliver someone else’s biological child without realizing it, and where a freezer malfunction can destroy hundreds of embryos in an instant.

“The government is going to pay for it,” Trump said of IVF in 2024. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?”

We want couples to have babies, yes, of course. But with every baby the government pays for by IVF, it funds the death of several more.