Bishop Michael F. Burbidge’s Statement on President Trump’s Fertility Care Benefit and IVF Advocacy
The White House yesterday announced new fertility initiatives intended to promote the growth of American families. President Trump announced the creation of a new optional fertility insurance benefit that will allow employers to offer a range of fertility care services alongside longstanding medical, dental, and vision benefits. Certainly, this 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, including treatments like NaProTechnology that address and resolve underlying causes of infertility. Unfortunately, the White House is also promoting unethical and unjust IVF procedures as a part of its fertility initiative.
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. 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.
It is imperative that law and policy uphold the dignity and rights of each person from the very first moment of his or her existence. Thankfully, the White House has not introduced any federal mandate that medical insurance cover IVF, and these recent announcements do not directly violate religious liberty or conscience rights. 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.
I wrote at greater length about these facts, which are inherent and unavoidable aspects of IVF, in my pastoral letter issued earlier this year on The Christian Family, In Vitro Fertilization, and Heroic Witness to True Love. God wills our perfection and sanctity, so that we all may have a future full of hope, and the Church’s teachings are for the common good of all nations and the individual good of all persons.
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.
- October 17, 2025
