IVF isn't pro-life or pro-women. The Cruz-Britt bill won't change that.

On Sunday afternoon, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) announced an in vitro fertilization bill with two aims: First, it would prohibit any state that receives Medicaid funding from prohibiting IVF, and second, it would “protect life.”  

But when the bill’s text was revealed the next morning, nothing about it was pro-life.   

In their Wall Street Journal article announcing the bill, the senators conclude: “This is an opportunity to unite on a shared bipartisan commitment to life.” 

Cruz and Britt are wrong. IVF, as practiced in the U.S., is not committed to protecting life. In the U.S., IVF regularly involves selective abortion, a procedure which, in other instances, Cruz and Britt have opposed.

When asked whether an “IVF embryo is considered life at conception” by a Bloomberg reporter during an interview on the bill, Cruz sidestepped the question, deflecting that the issue of abortion belongs with the states.  

Cruz has previously stated, “No right is more precious and fundamental than the right to life, and any just society should protect that right at every stage, from conception to natural death.” 

Britt also committed to a pro-life stance when she said, “As a Christian, conservative wife and mother of two precious children, I am proud to be 100 percent pro-life. Both my faith and the science tell me that life begins at conception, and I’ll fight tirelessly to protect life in the Senate.” 

But apparently, the right to IVF would appear to be more “precious and fundamental than the right to life.”  

To support IVF consistent with the senators' belief that life begins at conception, Cruz and Britt would need to promote ethical IVF practices that limit the negligent destruction of embryos (which they agree are unborn human lives), selective abortions created through IVF and the unlimited creation of embryos that are in turn cryopreserved indefinitely.

This bill addresses none of these safeguards. While the bill concludes by stating that nothing in the law “shall be construed to impede states from implementing health and safety standards regarding the practice of in vitro fertilization,” it fails to cover ethical standards that protect life and prohibit sex and disability discrimination. In fact, this bill, which has little nuance, would likely be interpreted to prohibit states from putting common sense safeguards on an unregulated industry.  

Further, the bill propagates lies about infertility, IVF and the assisted reproductive technology industry. The bill claims that IVF is an “effective and reliable means to achieving pregnancy,” but this couldn’t be further from the truth. 

For women under 35 who undergo a cycle of IVF, less than 25 percent will experience a live birth. As age increases, the percentage of successful live births decreases significantly. For example, women between the ages of “41-42 have a 5.7 percent chance, those 43-44 have 2.3 percent chance and women older than 44 have a 0.6 percent chance.” So for women, especially older women, IVF is neither an “effective” nor a “reliable” way to achieve a pregnancy, much less a live birth.   

The bill states that IVF is a “pro-woman and pro-family solution for those struggling to have children.” Yet it is neither of those thing. The assistive reproductive technology industry routinely promulgates or at least is part of an inadequate assembly line for women’s health. Rather than addressing underlying conditions that cause infertility, most women are immediately referred to IVF clinics where they spend their life's savings pursuing a pregnancy that will likely not be achieved. 

From contraception to infertility to assisted reproductive technology, IVF is the last step in a profit-based industry that fails to address the underlying causes of infertility and reproductive conditions. Now, Republican senators are feeding into this deceptively anti-woman scheme by introducing this bill. 

The senators’ bill is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) put it in a post on X, “Is there any state in which IVF is illegal? Or in which it’s likely to become illegal?” The answer to both questions is no. 

Indeed, the Alabama Supreme Court decision that initiated these discussions merely ruled in favor of a couple undergoing IVF who “pursue[d] a wrongful-death suit for the negligent destruction of their IVF embryos.” This decision did not actually put IVF at risk; rather, it protected couples and their embryonic children by ensuring that IVF clinics could not negligently destroy the embryos of couples undergoing IVF.

In their laudable efforts to support couples suffering from infertility, Cruz and Britt are taking a misguided approach. Even worse, they are compromising on their pro-life values to promote a bill that not only is unnecessary but also supports an ethically fraught industry.  

Natalie Dodson is a policy analyst with the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s HHS Accountability Project.