As IVF grows in popularity, so do the concerns of its opponents. Standard practice involves creating multiple embryos, which are screened for genetic abnormalities, and those that appear to be the healthiest can be transferred. Extra embryos are often frozen; One count, there are one and a half million frozen embryos in the United States. After a designated period of time, they can be handed over to science or destroyed, as the Catholic Church fears.
The anti-abortion movement won a partial victory for protecting life at conception in 2001, when Banned by President George W. Bush the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research, but President Barack Obama reversed the policy eight years later.
Since the late 2000s, voters have rejected ballot initiatives to preserve fetal viability in at least five states. Voters in deep red Mississippi look likely pass a personality test in 2011. But in the weeks before the election, doctors and abortion rights groups warned about the threat to IVF and birth control, and the initiative failed, 58 percent to 42 percent.
In criminal law, however, fetal personhood has been firmly established. In 1986, Minnesota passed a law that considered the death of a fetus a homicide in certain circumstances. More than 30 states now “give full recognition to unborn victims of violence,” in the words of the National Right to Life Committee, by applying the laws of fetal homicide at any point of development in utero. Some states have similarly extended child abuse laws to cover a fetus. Hundreds of women are persecuted based on these laws, usually for drug user during pregnancy, or, in some cases, after they miscarry.
Politically speaking, it is easier to suppress these women, who may be struggling with poverty or addiction, than to target the often middle-class and wealthy couples who turn to IVF (The procedure costs between $12,000 and $30,000.) The spokesman for Together with IVF is former Vice President Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian who opposes abortion. Pence and his wife, Karen, used IVF, he announced in 2022. Fertility treatments “deserve the protection of the law,” he said after. “They gave us great comfort during the long and challenging years we struggled with infertility in our marriage.”
