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“President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order aiming to reduce the costs of in vitro fertilization… The order instructed the assistant to the president for domestic policy to give Trump a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and ‘aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment’ within 90 days.” AP News
The left is critical of the order, arguing that it will not actually make IVF more accessible.
“[The order] leaves the law unchanged, but seeks to create the illusion of an accomplishment that’s popular with the electorate… If Trump actually wanted to ‘make IVF treatment drastically more affordable,’ he wouldn’t need to order aides to study anything. He could ask Congress to pass a bill that either further entrenches the Affordable Care Act by requiring insurance coverage of IVF, or massively increases the federal budget to pay for IVF treatments…
“The order also says it’s the administration’s policy to increase access by ‘easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.’ But deregulation would be ‘misguided,’ as Georgetown University Law Center professor Susan Crockin told The Cut… If there’s one industry that doesn’t need Silicon Valley’s mentality of ‘move fast and break things,’ it’s the one that creates and stores embryos.”
Susan Rinkunas, MSNBC
“Congressional Republicans are currently seeking to cut health spending by $880 billion — most of which would come from slashing Medicaid, which covers 80 million adults and children in the U.S., including about half of all pregnancies. Both Trump and the party have also called for ending the ACA, better known as Obamacare…
“If the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers really wanted to expand access to fertility treatments, they could just endorse the Right to IVF Act, a piece of Democratic legislation that would have codified the right to IVF and helped lower the cost of fertility treatments by guaranteeing they are covered by insurance, among other requirements. But last year, congressional Republicans — including Vice-President J.D. Vance, then an Ohio senator — blocked the measure twice.”
Andrea González-Ramírez, The Cut
“The lack of direct action on IVF in Trump’s Tuesday order is striking, especially in the context of Trump’s other executive orders, which have issued sweeping – and potentially illegal – mandates to eliminate birthright citizenship and roll back the rights of transgender people. The order does not, for example, mandate private employers cover IVF…
“‘In the wake of all these other executive orders that do such dramatic things so fast, this one still leaves you anticipating what’s really the policy change gonna be,’ said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. ‘If they start putting the pressure on private companies to include IVF that they put on them to dump DEI, maybe we [will] see some change.’…
“Still, Tipton added: ‘I would much rather have a policy that was thought out. I’m hopeful that they’re going to talk to the stakeholders, the experts, about what that policy should look like. And that’s going to take a little time.’”
Carter Sherman, The Guardian
The right is critical of the order and of IVF in general.
The right is critical of the order and of IVF in general.
“To the extent that fertility is declining, and it is, IVF is not the answer. Japan has one of the world’s highest rates of IVF use, far higher than the U.S., and yet its fertility is below ours and also falling faster. The answer to falling fertility is to make it easier for young adults to get married and stay married. The fall in birth rates is entirely caused by a decline and delay in marriage. Married couples have more children than single women do, and couples who get married earlier in life have more babies than couples who marry later…
“If Trump really wants to boost fertility by raising the marriage rate, he could also eliminate the many marriage penalties in the federal government’s social safety net. Virtually every means-tested federal government program, from the Earned Income Tax Credit to Food Stamps to Medicaid, punishes poor women who want to marry the father of their children…
“Over a trillion dollars is spent by state and federal governments on programs that punish marriage. Before we subsidize the IVF industry, we should eliminate these marriage penalties.”
Editorial Board, Washington Examiner
“There is basically no oversight or research about the long-term health effects on the women who must endure the extreme doses of hormones needed to conceive or the impact on the long-term health of their children. And the industry places no limitations on eugenic practices such as sex selection, which is offered in nearly three-fourths of clinics… The near total lack of regulation on the industry has earned it the label ‘the Wild Wild West’…
“Catholics have pioneered holistic approaches to women’s health and fertility such as Natural Procreative Technology (NaPro) that boast much better results than IVF… And now the scientific communities are catching up with advancements like the Oura Ring or at-home PdG testing with companies like Proov or the FDA-approved Natural Cycles app. These innovations are far more worthy of an executive order boon than a multibillion-dollar industry that has next to no guardrails.”
Ashley E. McGuire, National Review
“Like abortion, expanding IVF only means more unwanted, ‘extra’ human lives will be tossed out as trash. In the case of IVF, some are frozen indefinitely. Expanding access to IVF is deemed pro-family. In reality, it means more unborn lives will be treated as a means to an end. That is the definition of anti-life…
“The argument used in support of IVF by the Trump administration and its supporters is that it helps to create families. Any criticism of IVF is treated as anti-family during a time with below-replacement-level fertility rates. However, those who value life inside the womb of a teenager worried about motherhood and seeking an abortion should seamlessly apply the same concern to lab-created embryos used and stored in IVF facilities.”
Kimberly Ross, Washington Examiner
