Catholic bishops criticize Trump’s IVF expansion: Every life is ‘sacred and loved by God’

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 20, 2025 / 13:53 pm (CNA).

U.S. Catholic bishops are criticizing President Donald Trump’s effort to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) — a fertility treatment contrary to Church teaching that routinely discards human embryos.

Trump announced on Oct. 16 that the government entered an agreement with a pharmaceutical company to lower the cost of some IVF drugs and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is working to expedite the review of a new drug.

IVF is a fertility treatment in which doctors fuse sperm and eggs in a laboratory to create human embryos to implant in the mother’s womb. Millions of excess embryos not implanted have been destroyed or used in scientific research. Some are indefinitely frozen.

“We strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF that … freeze or destroy precious human beings and treat them like property,” three bishops said in a joint statement released by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

“Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God,” they continued. “Without diminishing the dignity of people born through IVF, we must recognize that children have a right to be born of a natural and exclusive act of married love rather than a business’ technological intervention. And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.”

The bishops added: “We will continue to review these new policies and look forward to engaging further with the administration and Congress, always proclaiming the sanctity of life and of marriage.”

The statement was signed by Bishop Robert Barron, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth; Bishop Kevin Rhoades, chairman of the Committee for Religious Liberty; and Bishop Daniel Thomas, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities.

Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, also released a statement criticizing the effort to expand IVF, calling such treatments “unethical and unjust.”

“God authors and blesses the life of every child born of IVF even as he wills the true good and thriving of all persons,” said Burbidge, who previously chaired the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities.

“The stark reality, however, is that IVF subverts the dignity of parents as well as the lives of unborn children,” he said. “Every child born by means of IVF will one day learn he or she has many missing brothers and sisters, who, although equal in dignity and rights, were conceived but deliberately denied their right to life. This is because many of the embryonic children brought about by every IVF process will either be discarded, having been deemed undesirable, or frozen, having been deemed unnecessary. By its nature, IVF both creates and destroys human lives.”

Pro-life fertility treatments also included

Regulators are also working to expand options for employers to offer fertility coverage for both IVF and treatments “that address the root causes of infertility.”

Although IVF is contrary to Church teaching, some of the latter treatments may include options compatible with Catholic teaching, such as natural procreative technology and fertility education and medical management.

In the joint USCCB statement, the bishops wrote that they are “grateful” the administration included non-IVF fertility treatments that provide “comprehensive and holistic restorative reproductive medicine, which can help ethically to address infertility and its underlying causes.”

Similarly, Burbidge called the inclusion “a welcome opportunity for all employers, and especially for the Church and its apostolates, to enhance their health care coverage by offering new or expanded coverage for ethical fertility care.”

“It is my hope that, by God’s grace and with time, all Christians and people of goodwill, especially including our civil authorities, will come to encourage and favor ethical and life-affirming fertility care that is conducive to the true health and flourishing of American families,” Burbidge wrote.

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