WASHINGTON (OSV News) — The Trump administration has no plans to implement a campaign promise from President Donald Trump to require the government or insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization treatments, the Washington Post recently reported.
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 moral and ethical concerns.
As a candidate for president in 2024, Trump pledged his administration would protect access to IVF but would have either the government or insurance companies cover the costly treatment. A 2024 Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet estimated that a single cycle of IVF costs from $15,000 to $20,000 and can exceed $30,000.
The pledge followed a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that found that frozen embryos qualified as children under the state law’s wrongful death law. The legal ruling, while limited in scope, aligned more with the position the Catholic Church has staked out against the legalization of IVF.
However, lawmakers in that state later enacted legal protections for IVF more broadly.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from OSV News about the Post’s report.
Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to the Post that Trump “pledged to expand access to fertility treatments for Americans who are struggling to start families.”
“The Administration is committed like none before it to using its authorities to deliver on this pledge,” Jackson said.
In February, Trump signed an executive order that aimed “to ensure reliable access to IVF treatment, including by easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens to make IVF treatment drastically more affordable.” That order sought policy recommendations within 90 days, a deadline the Post noted passed in May.
Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Life and Family Initiative, told OSV News, “I am hopeful, cautiously optimistic, that what’s been reported is true and that they won’t impose some sort of IVF executive order that could really harm the cause of life in the U.S.”
The 1987 document from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith known as “Donum Vitae” or “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.”
Out of more than 413,000 artificial reproductive technology cycles recorded in 2021, only 112,088 resulted in pregnancy. Of those, only 97,128 babies were successfully born, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The number of human embryos created each year by IVF in the U.S. runs into the hundreds of thousands annually – multiple embryos are typically created for use in an IVF cycle – with the majority typically lost through what fertility clinics call “IVF attrition.”
But proponents of IVF argued Trump broke a key campaign promise.
“On the campaign trail, Trump promised the government ‘will pay for, or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.’ He even dubbed himself the ‘Father of IVF,’ but now – to no one’s surprise – he is backtracking on these promises,” Reproductive Freedom for All, the abortion advocacy group formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, wrote in a post on its website.
“Donald Trump and anti-abortion extremists never intended to stop with overturning Roe v. Wade. Now, they want to ban abortion nationwide, and they have put birth control and IVF on the line,” the post said.
However, EPPC’s Brown argued that aside from Catholic concerns about IVF, it was actually “pretty unlikely” such a mandate could be issued by the president “in a legal way, which means you would have a big court battle over it.”
“And that’s not a clean win,” he said.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows 70% of U.S. adults, including 65% of U.S. Catholics, say IVF access is a good thing.
“It’s tough, because I think everybody knows couples who struggle with infertility,” Brown said in response to a question about public support for the practice. “Everybody wants couples who want to have a baby to be able to do so. And you know, we should obviously lead with empathy.”
In a 2024 interview with OSV News, Father Tad Pacholczyk, director of education and a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, noted that many Catholics lack significant formation in this area and usually have only a “vague notion” of the Church’s teaching on IVF. Ethical alternatives, such as restorative reproductive medicine, are also far less well known.
Brown said he hoped policymakers would consider certain reforms to prevent potential practices “that move beyond just helping people have babies to actually selecting their babies” for traits like eye color and hair color, screening embryos for certain predispositions for intelligence or athletics.