In a recent op-ed published in USA Today, Dr. Paula Amato, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, argue in favor of The Right to IVF Act, legislation that was subsequently rejected by lawmakers.
In their article, Amato and Collura defend IVF based on the sentiments that babies born via the process “have brought incalculable joy to their families” and the procedure “is supported by 85% of Americans.” They also use language to tug at the heartstrings of readers, noting that many families have taken additional jobs or drained their savings for the chance to welcome a baby. They contend that based on these reasonings, IVF should be a federally-protected right, covered by insurance, and more readily available.
In their defense of IVF, Amato and Collura note the emotional anguish that many families experience in the quest to get pregnant, and they aren’t wrong. Yearning for a much-wanted pregnancy and failing to achieve that goal is a reality for many families — and it’s heartbreaking.
And since IVF results in the creation of children, it’s touted by many as pro-life, even among those who oppose abortion. But despite all these sentiments, IVF can never be a true right – and never be pro-life – because it results in the destruction of human life.
According to research published in Reproductive Biomedicine Online, over 2.5 million IVF cycles are performed every year, but of those, only 500,000 babies are born annually. Research published in 2012 by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) showed that 93% of the embryos created through IVF since 1991 never survived to birth. While some failed to implant, others were donated to research or stored indefinitely. An astonishing 1.7 million embryos were simply thrown away. No human being has a ‘right’ to anything that would lead to the destruction of innocent human lives.
“By the numbers, the IVF industry violates the lives of children more often than the abortion industry does,” Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us told Live Action News in a previous interview. “If you love babies, you are going to oppose these reproductive technologies because the core technology that’s at the root of most of these processes, IVF, destroys more embryonic life than abortion does every year.”
While the number of lives destroyed is the primary reason there can never be a ‘right’ to IVF, the process is also inherently unfair to the children involved, treating them as commodities to be created at the whim of their parents, rather than human beings with inherent dignity and value. Many children born via IVF have spoken out as they grapple with the reality of knowing they have siblings who are still frozen, or the desire for an unknown biological parent after a birth via IVF and surrogacy.
“Somehow, somewhere, my parents developed the idea that they deserved to have a baby, and it didn’t matter how much it cost, how many times it took, or how many died in the process,” one woman told Them Before Us. “They deserved a child. And with an attitude like that, by the time I was born they thought they deserved to have the perfect child… as Dad defined a perfect child. And since they deserved a child, I was their property to be controlled, not a person or a gift to be treasured.”
Every human life that is created — no matter the method — has inherent value and dignity. But the right to [one’s own] life is considered to be the most fundamental of all human rights. If anything else deprives one of that right — as IVF does to the millions of embryos that are destroyed — it cannot truly be a right.
