….IVF is a topic that should be on the minds of pro-life Americans.

That Trump has promised to broaden access to IVF should be no surprise; he made that promise during his campaign. What is a surprise is that some prominent pro-lifers have urged us not to complain. On balance Trump has been good for the pro-life movement, they argue; we should not weaken him by criticism….

Social conservatives — those of us who hope that the Trump administration will prove friendly to family, faith, and natural law — should not hesitate to criticize our new President, for what he does and what he fails to do.

Federal support for IVF would require the taxpayers to subsidize a profit-making industry: an industry that is almost completely unregulated, and open to abuse. If we encourage IVF clinics to produce more human embryos, how long will it take the entrepreneurs to notice that unused embryos might be sold to medical researchers? For that matter, how do we know that gametes are not already on the market?

Most of the public criticism of IVF has rightly focused on the fact that the procedure results in thousands of unused, fertilized human embryos: unborn babies who will be frozen, stored, and eventually left to die. Already the number of these doomed babies produced by IVF every year outnumbers the death toll from legal abortions in the U.S. If the unused embryos are not destroyed, they are tempting targets for exploitation: to be used for spare parts, perhaps, or as the subjects for ugly custody battles in divorce cases.

But the fate of these poor defenseless babies is not the only compelling argument against IVF. Even if the procedure did not result in the waste of these unborn lives, it would still be an offense against the integrity of marriage. Think about how the gametes are collected: a cold, sterile process for the woman; a degrading and gravely sinful act for the man.

The general acceptance of contraception severed the link between the marital act and reproduction, allowing intimacy without procreation, with disastrous results for our families and our society. Now IVF threatens to do the same damage from the opposite direction, allowing procreation without intimacy. When IVF becomes commonplace, children are robbed of the healthy presumption that they were conceived in an act of marital love.

We can and should feel compassion for the married couples who find that they cannot conceive children. A truly “pro-family” approach to health care would provide them with any possible assistance to make their reproductive systems function as they should. (That’s what medical care is, after all: the effort to make human organs work properly.) Sadly, given the limits of our medical knowledge, some would still be unable to produce children, and that would be — that is — a heavy cross to bear. But it is wrong and dangerous for politicians to suggest that every couple has a “right” to children. Children are a gift, not a commodity. And if some couples have a “right” to children, our courts are bound to follow legal precedents and extend that “right” to all couples—not just married, not just heterosexual.

Moreover, while IVF advocates demand our sympathy for childless married couples, the procedure itself allows for ready exploitation by many other less sympathetic characters. IVF opens the door to surrogacy, to the exploitation of impoverished women for the benefit of elitists who choose to avoid the inconveniences of pregnancy, to the selective breeding of designer babies.

And again, all these evils could be accomplished with the help of your tax dollars. So if you don’t want to be complicit, don’t give Trump a pass on IVF.

By Phil Lawler on Catholic Culture