Republicans back IVF expansion as some pro-lifers push back

Jon Speed used to stand outside of Texas abortion facilities, hoping to talk women out of getting abortions. Now, he stands outside of fertility clinics and tries to convince couples not to begin the in vitro fertilization process.

In 2023, Speed decided he should take the issue more seriously after researching IVF for a video project for Choice42—a Christian media organization that makes videos critiquing abortion. He learned from that research how many unborn human lives end during the process. IVF involves stimulating a woman’s body to produce an excess amount of eggs, removing those eggs, fertilizing them in a lab, and transferring some of the resulting embryos—usually one or two at a time—back into a uterus.

“I look at it from a Christian perspective, and I look at it from a child sacrifice perspective,” Speed said. “And if you look at the numbers, you’re talking about maybe 25 to 30 human embryos destroyed for every one live birth. That’s worse than abortion, and it’s really—it’s devastating.”

Speed said that, at first, his conversations with couples considering IVF tended to be constructive and thoughtful—until an Alabama Supreme Court ruling a year ago brought the IVF issue into the political spotlight. These days, Speed said, people will stop their cars just to yell at him and the dozen-or-so other activists that stand outside with him. Others accuse him of thinking their already-born children conceived through IVF shouldn’t exist.

Since the 2024 ruling, high-profile Republicans have spoken out in support of the reproductive technology. Last year, pro-life Sens. Katie Britt, R-Ala., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas co-sponsored the “IVF Protection Act,” a bill that would have prevented states from prohibiting IVF. President Donald Trump, then on the campaign trail, promised his administration would make insurance companies cover IVF. Last March, Alabama’s majority Republican legislature passed a law granting civil and criminal immunity to IVF providers.

This year, IVF continues to headline national policy discussions. Multiple states are considering pro-IVF legislation, generally related to healthcare coverage for the procedure. One Republican-backed bill in Georgia proposes to codify a right to IVF in state law. On Feb. 18, Trump issued an executive order directing his staff to present policy recommendations for protecting IVF and making it cheaper for patients.

In reaction, pro-child organizations, including many that have long focused primarily on abortion, are speaking out and urging politicians to consider the technology’s implications for unborn children.

The day after Trump released his executive order, Them Before Us—an organization that seeks to prioritize children over adults in culture and public policy—issued a news release condemning it. “IVF has made a business of violating the rights of children,” it read, noting that most IVF-conceived babies are genetically screened out of existence, discarded as medical waste, or forgotten in freezers.

“IVF … enjoys a lot of support from the public, I think, largely because people are unaware of the very serious ethical problems that exist within the industry,” said Patience Sunne, the engagement director of Them Before Us.

A year ago, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that families could sue IVF providers for the destruction of their frozen embryos under the state law against wrongful death of a minor. An IVF lab accident that destroyed multiple embryos in 2020 sparked the lawsuit. After the ruling, several providers stopped offering IVF temporarily due to liability concerns.

“The industry, when held to the standard of, ‘you need to treat embryos as humans,’ suddenly said, ‘Wait, we can’t operate.’ And I think that tells us a lot about what’s been going on in the industry,” Sunne said.

Students for Life of America, a leading national pro-life organization, also spoke out against Trump’s executive order.

“Whether Trump, his administration, and his allies realize it or not, it’s a way to see more babies die in the United States, not make more of them,” Students for Life staff member Jordan Estabrook wrote on the group’s website. “If we take a deep dive, or even just dip our toes, into the business dealings, unethical practices of, and the loose safeguard [around] the IVF industry, the truth will quickly become clear: IVF may masquerade as pro-life, but it’s anti-life. In fact, IVF kills more children than abortion.”

Vice president of media and policy Kristi Hamrick said Students for Life has “taken a position of tremendous concern” about IVF for at least six years. She said the group’s message to the Republican Party is to slow down and take a closer look at the unregulated industry many of its members are supporting.

“When people say that they support IVF, what does that mean?” Hamrick asked. “Do you support the disposal of human beings in vast quantities?” She said her organization opposes any business model in which not all children get a chance to be born.

In Georgia’s House of Representatives, a bill that would codify a right to in vitro fertilization passed a House committee Monday. The bill’s primary sponsor is Republican Rep. Lehman Franklin, and five additional Republicans have signed on. The Republican speaker of the state house has also made the bill a priority for the session.

Franklin cites his and his wife’s own experience with infertility as a motivator for introducing the bill. Their daughter, conceived through IVF, is due this summer. “I want to ensure every family who faces the challenge of infertility has an opportunity to experience the miracle that IVF can provide,” Franklin said around the time he introduced the bill. His office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

“When something gets framed as a right, something that we saw when abortion was considered a right, was that regulation on a right is very difficult, and that expansion of a right is almost inevitable,” said Sunne of Them Before Us. “I’m sure that the legislator does not intend it to be that way. And I would be surprised if he’s really considered those implications.”

Just last week, a Georgia mother sued her fertility clinic for transferring another woman’s embryo into her uterus—the kind of mistake that has triggered clinic lawsuits and that pro-life groups say often results from the industry’s lack of regulation.

Georgia’s National Right to Life affiliate, Georgia Life Alliance, has not taken an official stance on IVF, but executive director Claire Bartlett said the group has raised concerns about the legislation and the way IVF treats unborn life like property.

“We are picking up this IVF piece as an opportunity to reeducate people about when life begins and how we treat life all the way to natural death,” she said.

Sunne said she is tracking legislation in Oregon that would subsidize IVF and a bill in Nevada that would prohibit the government from burdening or limiting assisted reproduction. Two failed Republican-backed bills in Virginia would have clarified the state’s abortion laws do not limit IVF and would have established an IVF tax credit. Another Democrat-backed bill that passed both legislative chambers in Virginia pushes for healthcare coverage of IVF. A Republican-backed bill in Utah would mandate government funding for state employees’ IVF procedures.

Sunne says many politicians, even pro-life lawmakers, rushed to support IVF in the immediate aftermath of the Alabama Supreme Court decision. But she has seen an increasing number take a more measured approach on the issue in the past year as they look for information about the industry. Others, she said, have backed away from supporting IVF legislation after talking with pro-life leaders.

Some Christians—both patients and doctors—try to practice IVF ethically by limiting the number of eggs they fertilize, foregoing genetic testing, not discarding embryos, and committing to implant every embryo they have, even if some have to wait in a freezer for a time. But that is not the approach the vast majority of providers and patients take. Sunne argues that ethically doing IVF would require the industry to drop practices it considers essential to its success rates—including the freezing of human embryos.

“Any couple that’s engaging in IVF … has to consider the fact that they are entrusting their children to an industry that does not recognize their children’s humanity, and that is a very serious concern,” she said. “Maybe there could be a pro-child way to do IVF, but … I don’t see that in the United States without massive changes from the industry.”

Speed from Choice42 said he sometimes talks to couples outside of fertility clinics who have already undergone IVF. He tries to focus on asking these couples questions about the process such as, how many of their eggs did the clinic fertilize? How many of those embryos continued to grow? How many of those that survived did the clinic discard when they determined they didn’t meet their quality standards? And how many of those survived the warming process after the clinic froze them? Of those that were transferred into the woman’s uterus, how many were actually born?

“It’s an urban legend that there’s this ethical IVF where you can bat 1,000 and get one egg to one embryo to one baby,” Speed said. “Those numbers just don’t exist.”