When anti-IVF pro-lifers flirt with blaming women for miscarriages

As evidenced by the friendly fire faced by former President Donald Trump for embracing the pro-life position of federalism supported by the entire movement prior to 2022, the anti-abortion movement is an intentionally vast group of varying, and often conflicting, factions.

On the one hand, you have disproportionately purple state pragmatists and reformers who focus on state bans criminalizing the most egregious cases of partial-birth abortions in the second trimester, which are also banned in most of Europe, and demand-oriented deregulation, such as the bipartisan push to grant more oral contraceptives over-the-counter status nationwide. On the other hand, you have abolitionists, who have not just called for national abortion restrictions or bans, but also walking back fertility technologies such as in vitro fertilization.

Live Action President Lila Rose and James Wilson Institute scholar Josh Craddock fall in the latter camp, authoring a National Review piece on Monday that drags the anti-IVF argument dangerously close to blaming women themselves for miscarriages.

Rose and Wilson are correct that IVF, which involves fertilizing an egg with sperm outside of the womb, often results in the creation of many more embryos than the parent or parents in question want to actually result in a live birth. As Erika Andersen detailed at Christianity Today earlier this year, pro-life patients who wish only to create as many embryos as they want to result in live births often face pushback from providers.

“High success rates are important to clinics, as this often results in more funding and patients,” Andersen writes of providers, who are likely to encourage excess embryo creation both because of the high likelihood of failure and financial incentive. “When mothers choose alternative IVF routes, like refusing to create as many embryos, pregnancy success is less likely, reflecting on clinic rates as a whole. Thus, evangelical pro-lifers are bad for business.”

But the point is that the pro-life position, that an embryo has a unique genetic identity and is made in the image of God, is not inherently antithetical to the practice of using IVF to create said embryos — so long as they aren’t intentionally destroyed. On top of limiting the number of embryos created to the number of desired babies, pro-life IVF patients can also donate embryos, not just to scientific research, which can make the trade-off of an individual life for potentially saving plenty of people in the future, but also to “adoptive” parents capable of carrying that embryo through gestation but unable to provide viable sperm or eggs to create their own genetic offspring.

This stance isn’t just logically sound, it also allows Republicans to operate within the Overton window of public opinion, considering that 78% of pro-lifers and 83% of evangelicals polled by Kellyanne Conway support continued legal access to IVF.

Rose and Craddock choose a different tact.

“What most families don’t know is that more than 85 percent of the children created through IVF will never be born,” Rose and Craddock write. “Some of these children are left in frozen nurseries indefinitely, while others are miscarried once transferred to a mother’s womb, or intentionally discarded and destroyed. The staggering cost of IVF is the millions of dead human children who are created to be killed or indefinitely frozen.”

As explored by Andersen, plenty of pro-life patients pursue IVF while simultaneously rejecting the principle of over-producing embryos, and on a state level, pro-life politicians could and perhaps should regulate how many “superfluous” embryos, for lack of a better term, are created and how we can avoid destroying them and instead triage excess embryos to other adoptive parents and scientific research.

But here, Rose and Craddock conflate the intentional destruction of embryos with a desired embryo failing to implant in a uterus, an equal distribution of blame that comes dangerously close to vilifying mothers themselves for miscarrying totally desired pregnancies.

By design, happening within a woman’s body, the implantation failure rate of in vivo fertilization cannot be precisely calculated by scientists, but scientists estimate that around 30% of all embryos are lost between fertilization and implantation. Thanks to increasingly sensitive technologies that can detect pregnancy hormones almost immediately after an embryo is implanted in the womb, scientists can now estimate that between 40% and 60% of implanted embryos do not survive to a live birth. Luckily, the overwhelming majority of these pregnancy losses occur exceedingly early in a pregnancy, often before a missed period or before a woman even knows she is pregnant, and these early pregnancy losses often result from chromosomal or physiological abnormalities with the embryo, not due to any action or infertility from the pregnant mother.

But that doesn’t mean that these early losses don’t matter, and I would reckon that there are no two people on the planet more devastated by a wanted embryo that fails to implant or proceed to a full-term pregnancy than a couple trying to become parents. This is true not just of IVF patients, but also of couples trying to conceive the old-fashioned way.

The notion that a couple whose embryo fails to transfer should feel any more guilty than a couple who fails to conceive naturally during an ovulation window is simply not grounded in the pro-life logic that all lives are created equally. The embryo that fails to implant after a sexual encounter is no less of a life than the embryo that fails to implant after IVF. Miscarriages are a sad but unavoidable feature of human biology, and blaming the womb, and thus the woman in question, comes eerily close to the sort of anti-maternal sexism that the Left constantly accuses pro-lifers en masse of embracing.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Furthermore, this logic lends itself to an uncomfortable possibility in the future. If, as fertility science progresses and potentially produces higher implantation and live birth rates than old-fashioned marital relations, will pro-lifers taking the most absolute approach to the matter be compelled to support conceiving only through IVF? If the calculation is that an embryo failing to implant is morally equivalent to intentionally destroying an embryo, let alone terminating a fully viable fetus at many months of gestation, then obviously pro-life absolutists will be obligated to embrace whatever conception method has the lowest failure rate, whether it is perceived as more “natural” or not.

With Trump’s federalism messaging leading the pro-life side against the radical agenda of Democrats wishing to legalize abortion nationally up until the point of birth, pro-lifers have the chance not just to win elections, but, even more importantly, hearts and minds. But like all great crusades to gain protections and dignity for the least privileged populations, the successful champions of the pro-life movement will embrace nuance and factual reality.