This article is first in a four part series on the Catholic viewpoints of reproductive technology
PROVIDENCE —America needs more babies. This became the official position of the United States government on February 18, when President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order expanding access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures through “policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments,” according to a fact sheet published by the White House on the same day.
The fact sheet stated that the intention of the order is to acknowledge “the importance of family formation” and ensure that “public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.”
It didn’t take long for two US Catholic bishops to respond.
On February 20, Bishop Robert E. Barron, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth; and Bishop Daniel E. Thomas, chairman of the Conference’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, issued a statement urging the administration to reconsider its official backing of IVF.
In their statement, the bishops acknowledged the pain experienced by couples who long to build a family but struggle with infertility. “Yet,” the bishops added, “the Administration’s push for IVF, which ends countless human lives and treats persons like property, cannot be the answer.”
Widely regarded as a cure for that pain, IVF operates by fertilizing multiple human eggs in a laboratory and then transferring one or more of the resulting embryos into the uterus for gestation. Because the procedure produces more embryos than can be transferred with a reasonable expectation of their survival, not all embryos are transferred. These are frozen for future transfer or research, or intentionally destroyed. Of the transferred embryos, there is a chance that one or more will die in utero or be aborted. In December 2024, the Charlotte Lozier Institute estimated that in 2019, 4-8 percent of embryos transferred within a year of starting an IVF cycle were brought to full term.
Because IVF bypasses the sexual union of the spouses in the creation of children, is used for surrogacy, and often results in the destruction of human embryos, the Catholic Church has always opposed the procedure, beginning with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith document Donum Vitae in 1987, (during the pontificate of the staunchly pro-life Pope John Paul II). Despite the Church’s clear teaching on the issue, a 2024 Pew Research Center study revealed that 65 percent of Catholics in the U.S. view IVF as morally acceptable.
But far from cutting off hope for those who long to be parents, the Church supports a treatment that addresses the underlying causes of infertility: restorative reproductive medicine.
This is the alternative answer that Bishops Thomas and Barron propose in their response to the recent executive order, expressing that they “look forward to working with the Administration to expand support for” this approach instead of IVF.
Unlike IVF, restorative reproductive medicine works to find and treat the root causes of infertility, said Monica Bergeron, a certified FertilityCare practitioner and owner of ICON Fertility Care Education Center in Rhode Island.
Bergeron, who holds a bachelor’s degree in human biology from Brown University and was trained at the St. Pope Paul VI Institute for Human Reproduction, specializes in the Creighton model of tracking a woman’s fertility cycle in order to naturally plan pregnancy. She works with about 30-40 couples per year to train them in the Creighton model and direct them to medical help
Restorative reproductive medicine combines this tracking with Natural Procreative Technology (NaPro) to determine whether a woman is experiencing infertility and then work with a NaPro-trained physician to diagnose and treat the underlying cause, which Bergeron said can include ovarian cysts or endometriosis.
IVF does not provide diagnosis or treatment of the underlying cause of infertility.
