October 22, 2025 // National

U.S. Bishops ‘Strongly Reject’ Trump’s Proposal to Boost IVF

OSV NEWS

WASHINGTON, D.C. (OSV News) – President Donald Trump announced a policy proposal on Thursday, October 16, to increase access to in vitro fertilization, including issuing guidance urging employers to offer fertility benefits directly to their employees. However, chairmen of three committees of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, including Bishop Rhoades, expressed concern the following day, stating that while they support ethical efforts to address infertility, they “strongly reject” the effort to promote IVF.

Trump previously campaigned on requiring the gov-
ernment or insurance companies to pay for IVF, which 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.

“In the Trump administration, we want to make it easier for all couples to have babies, raise children, and start the families they always dreamed about,” Trump said in comments at the White House.

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. His pledge came after 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. Alabama lawmakers later enacted legal protections for IVF.

“I’m asking all employers to make these new fertility benefit options available to their employees immediately,” Trump said. “The initiatives I’ve just announced are the boldest and most significant actions ever taken by any president to bring the miracle of life into more American homes.”

Officials with the U.S. Conference of  Catholic Bishops released a joint statement on Friday, October 17, from Bishop Rhoades, who chairs the Committee for Religious Liberty, as well as Bishop Robert E. Barron, chairman of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, and Bishop Daniel E. Thomas, chairman of its Committee on Pro-Life Activities.

In the statement, the bishops expressed gratitude for “aspects” of the president’s policies that intend to include ethical forms of “restorative reproductive medicine” the Church can support. But the bishops also made clear they “strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF,” pointing out the artificial fertility procedure involves the freezing and the destruction of excess embryos – human beings at the embryonic stage of their development – in the effort to bring about a live birth.

“Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God. Without diminishing the dignity of people born through IVF, we must recognize that children have a right to be born of a natural and exclusive act of married love, rather than a business’s technological intervention,” the bishops wrote. “And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.”

The bishops said they will “continue to review these new policies and look forward to engaging further with the administration and Congress, always proclaiming the sanctity of life and of marriage.”

In comments at the White House event, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a
Catholic and member of the Kennedy political family, said Trump was “doing God’s work” by “giving millions of Americans a chance to have babies.”

Asked by a reporter about those who have religious objections to IVF, Trump replied: “I don’t know about the views of that. I’m just looking to do something because – pro-life, I think this is very pro-life. This is – you can’t get more pro-life than this.”

IVF is among the fertility treatments to which the Catholic Church objects in its teaching on the sanctity of human life.

The 1987 document from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith known as Donum Vitae (“The Gift of Life”) states that 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.”