Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 20, 2025 / 13:53 pm (CNA).
U.S. Catholic bishops are criticizing President Donald Trump’s effort to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) — a fertility treatment contrary to Church teaching that routinely discards human embryos.
Trump announced on Oct. 16 that the government entered an agreement with a pharmaceutical company to lower the cost of some IVF drugs and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is working to expedite the review of a new drug.
IVF is a fertility treatment in which doctors fuse sperm and eggs in a laboratory to create human embryos to implant in the mother’s womb. Millions of excess embryos not implanted have been destroyed or used in scientific research. Some are indefinitely frozen.
“We strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF that … freeze or destroy precious human beings and treat them like property,” three bishops said in a joint statement released by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
“Every human life, born and preborn, is sacred and loved by God,” they continued. “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’ technological intervention. And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.”
The bishops added: “We 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.”
The statement was signed by Bishop Robert Barron, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth; Bishop Kevin Rhoades, chairman of the Committee for Religious Liberty; and Bishop Daniel Thomas, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities.
Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, also released a statement criticizing the effort to expand IVF, calling such treatments “unethical and unjust.”
“God authors and blesses the life of every child born of IVF even as he wills the true good and thriving of all persons,” said Burbidge, who previously chaired the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities.
“The stark reality, however, is that IVF subverts the dignity of parents as well as the lives of unborn children,” he said. “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.”
Pro-life fertility treatments also included
Regulators are also working to expand options for employers to offer fertility coverage for both IVF and treatments “that address the root causes of infertility.”
Although IVF is contrary to Church teaching, some of the latter treatments may include options compatible with Catholic teaching, such as natural procreative technology and fertility education and medical management.
In the joint USCCB statement, the bishops wrote that they are “grateful” the administration included non-IVF fertility treatments that provide “comprehensive and holistic restorative reproductive medicine, which can help ethically to address infertility and its underlying causes.”
Similarly, Burbidge called the inclusion “a welcome opportunity for all employers, and especially for the Church and its apostolates, to enhance their health care coverage by offering new or expanded coverage for ethical fertility care.”
“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,” Burbidge wrote.
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Glad they expressed an objection, and bless them, even though I have my doubts about how strongly they feel it.
Hopefully they’ll encourage priests to share this info with us in the pews. That hasn’t been a thing in the past & many Catholics I know believe that IVF is prolife because it can result in a birth.
If Catholics think IVF is prolife why do we expect Pres. Trump to know any better?
Hope so too. But over the last four decades or so, I’ve never heard a single pro-life homily, except from unique figures like the late Father Richard Neuhaus and the late Monsignor Phillip Reilly. And I’ll also concede a pro-life very early morning homily from whichever priest joins us on the bus to Washington for the annual March for Life. Speaking of which, decades ago some would march with a sign that read, here are your people, where are our bishops?
Nonetheless, in more recent years a few have trickled in.
Everything we do in life is a source of witness. I wish I could remember this when I occasionally cuss.
What lies behind this debate over IVF is not merely a bioethical dispute about embryos or medical technique, but a profound philosophical crisis — the triumph of moral relativism over the classical and Christian understanding of truth, being, and human dignity.
Relativism is not new. It has a history — indeed, it has the history of humanity’s fall. The first relativist was not a man, but the Devil. His argument in Eden — “You will not die … you will be like God, knowing good and evil” — was the prototype of all later moral subjectivism. The serpent’s logic introduced the fateful idea that good and evil are relative, that truth is negotiable, that divine law is a matter of interpretation. This primordial “hermeneutic of suspicion” toward God’s word continues, refined and intellectualized, in every age.
The Sophists of ancient Greece were its first human spokesmen. “Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras. Against them rose Socrates, insisting that the soul must conform itself to truth, not truth to the soul’s desires. This same battle — between the arrogance of the self-measured man and the humility of the truth-seeking man — is the one we still fight today.
In Christian philosophy, neither Plato nor Aristotle reduced being to thought. The mind was to receive, imitate, and participate in what is. Truth, therefore, was objective, ontological, and binding. But with Descartes — “I think, therefore I am” — a seismic reversal occurred. Being was subordinated to consciousness. The “I” became the measure not only of truth but of reality itself. This idealist revolution was the philosophical fall of modernity, giving rise to the many descendants of Cartesian egocentrism: pantheism, atheism, Marxism, and, in the moral order, the sexual revolution.
From this genealogy arises the modern “culture of death,” in which even life itself is defined by utility, convenience, and control. IVF, therefore, is not just a medical act; it is a metaphysical declaration. It asserts that human life may be produced, selected, frozen, or discarded at will — that man may be both the artisan and the arbiter of being. It is the culmination of the Cartesian project: not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I produce, therefore I am.”
The bishops are right to condemn IVF, not only because it destroys innumerable embryonic lives, but because it corrodes the very notion of what it means to be human. Each embryo is not a potential human being; it is a human being with potential — a person who already is. When human life becomes a byproduct of technique, children cease to be gifts and become commodities. Love yields to manufacture; procreation becomes production.
This is why IVF, for all its apparent compassion, represents a deeper spiritual crisis than abortion itself. Abortion kills; IVF redefines. It teaches society to see life as raw material, to accept that the most sacred mystery — the transmission of life — can be mastered and mechanized. It turns the womb into a laboratory and the act of love into an industrial process.
In this sense, IVF is the emblem of the technological relativism of our age — the same relativism that began in Eden, found its philosophical expression in the Sophists, and took metaphysical root in Descartes. Its logical end is the abolition of man, the transformation of the human person into an object of design.
The bishops’ warning is therefore prophetic. To reject IVF is not to reject science; it is to defend the ontological dignity of life and the integrity of love. If man is no longer born of the gift of persons but of the will to power, then even the family, the first temple of human communion, becomes an artifact. Against this new Babel, the Church stands as the last custodian of the truth that life is sacred because it is not ours.
Paolo thank you for this well-crafted comment.
It was a pleasure to read.
That relativism was the devil’s action from the beginning is an eye opener in this age of post-Fiducia supplicans which relativises mortal sin for Ecumenical New Church.
Kind regards
CN
I agree. A well expressed thumbnail history of vanity to which we might add the current relativism of “diversity” and subjectivism of “discernment,” that is discernment without humility. And we know how easily we forget true prophesy. Benedict began his papacy with a reflection on the poison of relativism, and the first day of Leo’s pontificate began with his validating cultural prerogatives for interpreting Fiducia Supplicans.
“Catholic bishops criticize Trump’s IVF expansion: Every life is ‘sacred and loved by God’”
And, yet, so many of our bishops are ambivalent about the moral horror of abortion. Case in point: Cupich’s wanting to give a lifetime achievement award to a Catholic politician who was an outspoken supporter of killing unborn, defenseless babies. And furthermore you could count on both hands the number of bishops who came out publicly against his doing so. But when it comes to Trump and IVF, the bishops suddenly find their voice. We’re not having any more of your fecklessness
Here’s what I have to say to all our bishops and to Pope Prevost: Stop the politicization of Christ’s Church. The Church does NOT belong to you; it is Christ’s.
Indeed notice the lack of outrage of the bishops at Cardinal Cupich’s efforts to honor Democrat Senator Durbin, who favors allowing the killing of unborn babies or their silence over the pro-abortion policies of Presidents Biden, Obama, etc. ; and notice how the Pope honors Cupich by naming him to an office in the Vatican; and notice how the Pope wants open borders in other countries but keeps his own little country with some of the most strict anti-illegal aliens laws in the Western world. How applicable to all of them is
Matthew 23:13
For the Vatican’s laws and practices against illegal immigration see
Vatican Promises Stiff Penalties for Illegal Aliens Crossing its Border
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/01/16/vatican-promises-stiff-penalties-for-illegal-aliens-crossing-its-border/
IVF is expensive. Are taxpayers going to get saddled with much of the cost? Achieving a viable pregnancy might cost $50,000. If you expand this to a million cases,you will be talking billions of Dollars. Where is that money coming from?
The same place Medicaid surgical gender mutilation money come from. Taxpayers.
Over the years, my wife and I have paid a lot of taxes. It’s discouraging to think what our tax dollars go to.
Since we sometimes disagree, I wanted to say, “Hear, hear!” Living in Oregon for 35 years has been especially discouraging on the tax front. Taxes are very high here (and 5-10 billion more just passed a few weeks ago), and most of them are wasted: corruption, ineptness, horrible agendas, lousy public education (ranked 45th in the nation for decades), etc. It’s maddening.
Going seamless garment on us? Movement in the right direction is not to be welcomed unless every aspect of their governance meets your approval?
I am definitely opposed to Trump’s efforts to increase access to IVF.
However, I see the action of the USCCB as typical – send a letter to the president, or congress.
As much as I oppose Trump’s action on this, he is not our chief teacher of the faith, and sending a letter to him does not fulfill the teaching function of the bishops.
They need to teach the evil of IVF in their diocese, and have their priests do the same.
There are people in my parish who think that IVF is a good thing.
A lay person explaining to someone why IVF is not a good thing does not have nearly the effect that a priest would have saying the same thing from the pulpit.
If only the clergy had been onboard with the promotion of NFP and opposing contraception, we might not be in this situation. I gave up trying to teach NFP when the priests refused to support my efforts and assured people that contraception is okay if your conscience said so.
So, Democrats say…We must kill children in vetro. If children survive our attempts to kill them, we must kill them immediately after birth. We must also allow hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked and work as slaves. Bishops say the democrats must be honored with lifetime achievement awards for their efforts at killing and trafficking children. OR, we at least must overlook the killing because trafficking children is such a good practice.
Republicans say…We must make it easier for childless couples to conceive via IVF. Bishops immediately write a letter condemning the republicans.
Got it.
One of my college roommates had four children. Two went to Notre Dame, one to Catholic University of America and the last to Loyola. My friend and his wife are fervent Catholics and brought their children up similarly. Two of his fully Catholic-educated children had four children – two each all of whom were born as a result of IVF (to my friend’s consternation). The tuition for “Catholic” education just at the university level for all four probably cost him no less than $400,000.
Exactly, DR. Until we properly teach Catholics about IVF (or at least attempt our very best) how do we expect someone like Donald Trump to get it?
One has to wonder if this expansion is additionally a Trumpian gift to his Log Cabin Republicans who need IVF to fabricate their families. Two men can now borrow/hire an egg/s (from a female friend or relative perhaps); each man may even donate their own sperm to have “half-siblings” (split -cycle) and so perpetuate the “romantic mystery” that each of them are the “fathers”, and then hire a woman (another friend or an industrial ally) for the gestational period, while the two men sit back until birth, when they will place both their names on the birth certificate, the whole case being sealed (in many states) so that the child will never know its biological or birth mother (since the child may actually have both). I would have liked to see the bishops take the opportunity to call out this pre-meditated, psychological, child abuse.
It’s a shame when adults purposely deprive a child of a parent but these days an IVF or surrogacy child can use DNA testing to track relatives down and hopefully information on their parent’s identity.
So. Yet again.
The Catholic Church, identified as the USCCB in America, has apparently satisfied itself as to its’ apostolic mission by publishing the referenced letters of the four bishops. There is nothing here to suggest an evangelical purpose. There is nothing to suggest a clear exhortation for the moral education of the Catholic Laity. Check the boxes; file for any future need or evidence.
The American institutional Catholic Church is in spiritual stagnation, blissfully mis-understanding the primacy of its’ real purposes, and quite detached from the needs of the Laity and its’ potential in behalf of the secular world. For this world sorely needs bishops who do less “Ruling”, and a great deal more “Teaching”. Exemplify, and require of pastors, specific dogmatic instruction (such as a homily like the above note by Paolo Giosue)
Bishops need to effect real moral knowledge and living by their community. The killings by Catholic persons and hospitals in their dioceses, whether by IVF, by killing from organ/tissue harvesting, by hidden euthanasia, etc. must be acknowledged and stopped.
Well said and amen, Roger Miller.
Oh … now we hear the bishops with their prophetic voice. I seem to recall that then-USSCB president Archbishop Gomez had a strong pro-life letter to Biden in 2021, but Cardinals Cupich and Tobin prevailed on Bergoglio (do you think that was a hard sell?) to make Gomez stand down and withdraw the letter. Well, aren’t we all happy they have finally found their voice. Oh, yeah, that’s right! Biden is no longer president. The USCCB never skips a beat when it comes to “speaking truth to power.” Oh, maybe they do skip a beat … all depends on whether the president is democrat or republican.