Trump touts IVF mandate but mulls religious exemption in EWTN interview

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he “will look at” a religious exemption to his proposed mandate to cover in vitro fertilization treatments, commonly known as IVF — a procedure the church condemns as linked to the “abortion mentality” and destructive of human life — in an interview with a Catholic television host.

Trump previously pledged his administration would require the government or insurance companies to pay for IVF in comments to multiple media outlets. IVF is a form of fertility treatment opposed by the Catholic Church on the grounds that it often involves the destruction of human embryos, among other concerns, including the commodification of human beings and the potential for it to lead to “a system of radical eugenics.”

In a brief interview with Raymond Arroyo of the Eternal Word Television Network, “The World Over” host asked Trump about his proposed mandate and whether he would include a religious exemption in such a policy.

“The other day you said, ‘I’m the father of IVF,'” EWTN’s Arroyo said. “As you know, some Catholics feel and the Catholic Church believes when you implement this technology, you’re killing embryos. Will you have a religious exemption to your IVF mandate for religious organizations and businesses that feel this violates my religious principles?”

Trump replied, “Well, you know, I haven’t been asked that, but it sounds to me like a pretty good idea, frankly.”

“But even Catholics, a lot of them, they want IVF,” Trump said. “It’s fertilization, basically. And, you know, they view that as helping a family, helping parents have a child. And it’s a very popular thing. But certainly if there’s a religious problem, I think people should go with that. I really think they should be able to do that. But we will look at that.”

In an interview with NBC News on Aug. 29, Trump said that if elected, his administration would protect access to IVF and would have either the government or insurance companies cover the costly treatment. A Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet estimates that a single cycle of IVF costs from $15,000 to $20,000 and can exceed $30,000.

The 1987 document from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith known as “Donum Vitae” (“The Gift of Life”) states the church opposes IVF and related practices, including gestational surrogacy, in part because “the connection between in vitro fertilization and the voluntary destruction of human embryos occurs too often.”

Issued by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, the teaching named the “right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death” and “the child’s right to be conceived, brought into the world and brought up by his parents” as behind the church’s moral objections to those practices. It noted that human embryos are typically overproduced in IVF, with those not successfully implanted being either destroyed or frozen, or even “sacrificed for various eugenic, economic or psychological reasons” after implantation.

“The political authority consequently cannot give approval to the calling of human beings into existence through procedures which would expose them to those very grave risks noted previously,” that document said.

The U.S. bishops’ 2009 teaching document, “Life Giving Love in an Age of Technology,” states, “The Church has compassion for couples suffering from infertility and wants to be of real help to them. At the same time, some ‘reproductive technologies’ are not morally legitimate ways to solve those problems.” That document lists IVF as among problematic means of treatment, arguing it reduces the conception of a child to “into a manufacturing process.”

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 238,000 patients underwent nearly 414,000 cycles of assisted reproductive technology (nearly always IVF treatments) in 2021. This resulted in over 112,000 clinical pregnancies and nearly 92,000 live births.

Multiple embryos are typically created for use in an IVF cycle, so the number of human embryos currently created each year by IVF in the U.S. runs into the hundreds of thousands — with the majority typically lost through what fertility clinics on their websites call “IVF attrition.”

According to an estimate provided to OSV News by Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, Trump’s IVF mandate would likely at a minimum cost $55 billion over 10 years, and increase with the demand as the costs are absorbed by taxpayers and “very large increases” in health insurance premiums.

Elsewhere in the interview, asked if he would reinstate the Mexico City policy, which forbids international spending on abortion in family planning programs, Trump claimed he “was the only one that did that.”

“As you know, no other president did that,” he said. “And we’re going to be giving that a very good, serious look: in other words, how that compares and competes with the states. But we’ll be giving that a very serious look.”

Although the Trump administration expanded the policy to include funding for global health assistance, the policy itself was first announced in 1984 by the Reagan administration.

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