CV NEWS FEED // In an op-ed published Feb. 24 by The Hill, legal scholar Carter Snead and policy expert Yuval Levin urged President Donald Trump to proceed with extreme caution as his administration advances efforts to promote in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Trump signed an executive order Feb. 18 directing his Domestic Policy Council to develop recommendations to “lower costs and reduce barriers” to IVF.
While acknowledging that IVF has helped many couples experience the joy of parenthood, the authors noted the complex ethical, legal, and medical concerns surrounding the practice.
“More than 20 years ago, we helped to counsel another U.S. president on the vexing complexities of regulating assisted reproductive technologies,” the authors wrote. “We have been carefully studying the ethical and legal dimensions of the matter ever since. We respectfully advise Trump and his team to proceed slowly and with great care, as this issue is much harder than it seems.”
Snead, the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served as general counsel to President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. Levin was the council’s executive director.
Snead and Levin stressed that IVF is “like no other” medical endeavor because it involves creating human life, resulting in multiple individuals whose well-being must be considered — genetic parents, gestational mothers, rearing parents, and, most importantly, the children conceived through the process.
They also cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing associations between IVF and higher rates of birth defects, preterm births, and other complications. Despite these risks, the authors noted, “[T]here are still no federally funded longitudinal studies on the health and well-being of in-vitro mothers and babies.”
Snead and Levin highlighted the IVF industry’s lack of regulation, noting that this has led critics from diverse perspectives to describe the legal landscape of the industry as a “Wild West.” They pointed to the absence of comprehensive federal oversight of the effects reproductive technologies have on children, egg donors, or gestational mothers.
The authors also noted the industry’s failure to self-regulate. They cited ethically questionable practices such as elective sex selection, screening embryos for non-medical traits like eye color, and offering discounted “batches” of embryos based on preferred characteristics.
Noting the widespread creation, freezing, and destruction of human embryos as a key ethical concern, the authors shared estimates suggesting that more than one million embryos are currently in cryo-storage in the United States.
“For any elected official who cares about the intrinsic equal dignity and matchless worth of every human being, born and unborn, protecting the weakest and most vulnerable in this context must be of paramount concern,” the authors wrote. “Under no circumstances should the federal government promote medical practices that result in the intentional or negligent destruction of human life at any stage of development.”
Before implementing further measures to expand access to IVF, Snead and Levin urged Trump’s team to thoroughly study these concerns, considering the safety of mothers and babies, the industry’s lack of regulation, and the ethical implications of current practices.
“Most importantly, in its deliberations,” they said, “the Trump team should hold in its collective mind that the animating purpose of all of these efforts is to build a world in which all children are protected, welcomed and loved unconditionally as the gifts they are.”
>> US bishops: Trump’s pro-IVF executive order ‘cannot be the answer’ <<
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