IVF and the Language of Gift: A Theological Commentary on a Recent Executive Order

On February 18, 2025, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order titled “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization.” This order “directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments” according to the White House’s press office. The order, the White House said, “recognizes the importance of family formation and that our Nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.”

The Catholic Church’s magisterial and pastoral stance vis-à-vis IVF has, from the advent of the practice in scientific research, been one of staunch criticism and resistance. The Church strongly condemns the production—and subsequent exploitation—of living human embryos necessarily intertwined with IVF procedures, as practiced in the United States. But isn’t the Church also the leading global institution to “recognize[] the importance of family formation”? How could we not only resist but condemn a process that makes it “easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children?”

It’s well known that the Church considers openness to the gift of new life as integral and necessary for the proper celebration and living of the sacrament of matrimony. Indeed, among the questions that immediately precede the exchange of marriage vows, the minister asks whether the couple is “prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church.” An affirmative answer is required for valid confection of the sacrament. So, again: why the resistance to a scientific process that can bring about children and is a frequent recourse for those who bear the cross of infertility?

Gratuity at the Root

The answer lies in the language of gift. Our bodily existence as persons made for love has its origin in divine generosity—in a sheerly gratuitous act of creation by a God who creates by speech, and which creation emerges wholesale with a nature and a destiny that is utterly shaped by its Divine Author. This gratuitousness—this marvelous “it did not need to be this way”—is the ground and source of all intelligibility in the world and in the interiority of the human person. The fact that God makes us one way or another (“male and female he created them”) is not a threat to our autonomy; rather, it is the very condition for our freedom, for our capacity to love, for our desire for union with another in a total self-gift. Pope John Paul II tirelessly championed the beauty of marriage because it is the “primordial sacrament,” the “sacrament of Creation.” In the total gift of self marked by an exchange of vows that promise fidelity, fruitfulness, and permanence, the human person willingly and decisively enters into that stream of divine generosity at the root of all things. 

Marriage—and thus the family—is best understood to be a response to a given order that is itself a total gift, totally gratuitous. Families are not so much made by legal act as they are entered into by way of grateful response to a gift offered by God. 

Because the “shape” of marriage and family, so to speak, is that of a grateful response to a gift being offered, so too the possibility of conceiving and welcoming a child into the world bears the same contours. The Church forbids us to engage in contraceptive practices because they insert a profound “no” into the midst of this sacred order—one that thrives only on a series of consistent and meaningful affirmations in response to the gifts being offered.

A Gift without a Giver Is a Commodity

Which brings us back to the question of IVF. Like contraception, IVF divorces conjugal intercourse from the means God has given us to become families. It is a fundamental premise of the Church’s understanding of the human person and the God-given order of the family that the “unitive” and “procreative” elements of conjugal union never be sundered; in IVF and in contraception, they are separated. It is the separation that is the root issue. 

But the issue is also broader than that. The increasingly widespread—and soon, more accessible—practice of IVF preys on the vulnerable among us and creates more vulnerable people in the process. IVF is a common recourse for those who experience infertility. It presents a technological solution to a biological problem. While the Church is not in the business of wishing suffering upon anyone, it does tirelessly work to make our suffering meaningful, especially recognizing that Christ’s passion and death on the Cross mark the decisive stooping-down of God to be wounded and suffer beside us and for our sake. Infertility is a tremendous burden, deeply painful and complex, which cries out to heaven for resolution. But the Church looks to that burden and sees there—even there!—a gift on offer. The insight here is that God can transform our suffering into our redemption. In the words of the philosopher Robert Spaemann, “Experiencing a lack is always more fruitful than having some surrogate.” IVF thus subtly convinces couples to trade their suffering for a technological solution, to grasp after something manageable and to set aside what only Christ can help us to bear. It is thus—precisely in the name of a good desire for children—a profound “no” to the gift of suffering given to persons in such a situation. It’s for this reason, among others, that the Church has said in Donum Vitae that IVF “is in itself illicit and in opposition to the dignity of procreation and of the conjugal union, even when everything is done to avoid the death of the human embryo.”

IVF’s exploitative nature is compounded radically when one looks at its concrete practice, where the commodification of children occurs as a result—and on an unimaginable scale. It is a dystopian practice: only about 20 to 30 percent of IVF cycles result in a live birth. To guard against this inevitability, multiple embryos are produced in the stages prior to implantation. By embryos, of course, we mean persons—children at their earliest stages of biological development. Among the number created, only seven percent will make it to live birth. Ninety-three percent of these lives are miscarried, aborted, or frozen and stored in warehouses like chattel. According to the most readily-accessible statistics, there are over one million frozen embryos in the U.S. alone. And, as many who are well-versed in the data will tell you, more children are discarded via IVF each year than through medical and surgical abortion combined.

Another set of victims of IVF deserves mention: all future human beings. In his Abolition of Man (written in 1943!), C. S. Lewis offers a piercing reflection on contraceptive technology and its effect on the future: 

And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of the power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

The connection of this passage with the points I have been making may be obvious, but at least one is worth reiterating: IVF prioritizes human power over and above divine gift, and as a result it makes victims of all of us. It robs couples of the fruitfulness of suffering, it commodifies children like chattel, and it makes future generations the inheritors of a worldview and a culture that militate against obedience to God’s loving commands. 

While it should go without saying, let me reiterate something essential here at the end: every life is sacred, and so every child is sacred, no matter the means of their conception. Children conceived via IVF are to be celebrated like any other, and afforded the same rights and dignity as all human persons. But the ends do not justify the means: not all ways of conception are to be promoted, much less celebrated. Children are owed all that is natural and proper to marriage, including natural conception.

This IVF executive order is anything but pro-life, and it is most certainly not pro-family. It is to be condemned in the strongest terms, and that condemnation must authentically inform Catholic life and family policy and practice. I pray fervently that the process of policy consultation that will soon come as a result of this executive order leave room, at the absolute minimum, for religious and conscience exemptions. But this is the bare minimum. Let us instead petition Heaven for a greater gift: that at the level of law and public policy there might be an authentic recognition of the integrity of the child as a gift to be received, not grasped.

Image by Andriy Bezuglov and licensed via Adobe Stock.