Various bishops from the United States responded to President Donald Trump's announcement pledging to expand access to and lower costs for various fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization (IVF).
The announcement was made from the White House on October 16, 2025, and is a follow up to an executive order issued in February 2025 titled "Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization." The October announcement involved an agreement with pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of prescription drugs as well as the creation of insurance plans specifically to cover IVF and other fertility treatments.
“Though we are grateful that aspects of the Administration’s policies announced Thursday intend to include comprehensive and holistic restorative reproductive medicine, which can help ethically to address infertility and its underlying causes, we strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF that instead freeze or destroy precious human beings and treat them like property,” said an October 17 statement signed by Bishop Robert Barron, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (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.
Bishops Barron, Rhoades, and Thomas are the bishops of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota; Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana; and Toledo, Ohio, respectively.
“Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God," said the bishops.
"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’s 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 they "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.”
"Unethical and unjust IVF procedures"
Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, whose territory is directly next to Washington, DC, also responded to Trump's announcement.
While the creation of fertility care services benefits is "a welcome opportunity for all employers, and especially for the Church and its apostolates, to enhance their healthcare coverage by offering new or expanded coverage for ethical fertility care," the White House "is also promoting unethical and unjust IVF procedures as a part of its fertility initiative," said Burbidge.
"Since its advent in 1978, more than 12 million children have been born by IVF. God authors and blesses the life of every child born of IVF even as he wills the true good and thriving of all persons. The stark reality, however, is that IVF subverts the dignity of parents as well as the lives of unborn children," he said.
Those who were born through 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," said Burbidge.
"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."
The law, as well as policies, must "uphold the dignity and rights of each person from the very first moment of his or her existence," said the bishop.
"Contrary to common good"
Trump's announcement was not a federal mandate ordering insurers to cover IVF treatments, and "these recent announcements do not directly violate religious liberty or conscience rights," said Burbidge.
"Yet, the fact remains that IVF is contrary to the common good and therefore it is wrong for the federal government to promote IVF as if it were a morally neutral form of fertility care."
In the future, said Burbidge, "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."
