The IVF question that splits pro-life conservatives, argued fairly

"I'm not sure." Try finding that sentence at a Republican dinner. On most questions, we know exactly what we think and we are happy to tell the room. On this one, thoughtful people who agree about almost everything else go quiet, look at their plates, and change the subject to the weather.

The subject is in vitro fertilization, and the reason for the silence is that it puts two things we care about in the same room, and they do not always get along. We care about children and the families that long for them. We also care about every human life, including the very smallest. For most of the pro-life movement's history those two commitments pointed the same way. IVF is the place where reasonable people think they sometimes point in different directions.

I am not going to tell you there is a tidy answer. I am going to do something more useful: state each serious position as its own defenders would state it, walk through what the law does and does not decide, and let you see where the real disagreement lives. You can finish this post and still disagree with me. You should not finish it thinking the other side is stupid or cruel. Neither side is.

One more thing before we start. This is a post about law, ethics and public policy. It makes no medical claims, and nothing here is medical advice. If you or someone you love is facing infertility, your doctor and your pastor, priest or rabbi are the right people to talk to, not a blog.

What IVF is, in the terms the law uses

In vitro fertilization means that an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body, in a laboratory. The resulting embryo can be transferred to a woman's womb. Embryos that are not transferred can be frozen and stored. That last fact is the one that creates the legal puzzle, because a frozen embryo is not a hypothetical. It is an object in a tank at a clinic, owned by somebody, stored under a contract, and the law has to say what it is.

Is it a person? Is it property? Is it something in between that deserves special respect but not the full set of legal rights? Every legal question about IVF eventually comes back to that one.

The first pro-life position: the Church's teaching, and the case it makes

The Catholic Church has addressed this directly, in two major documents. The first is Donum Vitae, issued in 1987 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The second is Dignitas Personae, issued in 2008. Their reasoning, in outline, runs as follows.

One. A human being begins at conception, and the embryo deserves the respect owed to a person.

Two. A child should be the fruit of the marital act between husband and wife, not a product assembled in a laboratory. When the child's origin is separated from that act, the child is made rather than given.

Three. The usual practice of IVF produces more embryos than are transferred. Some are frozen, some are discarded, and some never get a chance to be born. If each embryo is a person, that is a grave moral problem, and no good intention on the part of the parents erases it.

The Southern Baptist Convention reached a related conclusion by its own route. At its 2024 annual meeting the convention adopted a resolution on reproductive technologies and the dignity of the human embryo. It expressed concern about the destruction of embryos in the IVF process, and it urged believers and lawmakers to restrain practices inconsistent with the dignity of the embryo. Notice what that is and is not. It is not a statement that couples who used IVF are villains. It is a statement about a practice and the moral status of its byproducts.

Here is the strongest form of this position, in my words. If we mean what we say about the unborn, we cannot carve out an exception for the unborn who were created in a clinic, simply because their creation was welcomed. A pro-life ethic that applies everywhere except where the demand is sympathetic is not an ethic. It is a mood. That is a serious argument, and it deserves a serious answer, not an eye-roll.

The second pro-life position: the case for defending access

Now the other side, and I want to give it its due, because it is held by a great many people who are as pro-life as anyone.

The defenders of IVF access argue as follows.

One. The purpose of IVF is to bring children into the world. The couple at the clinic is not trying to avoid a child; they are doing nearly everything they can to have one. A movement that exists to welcome children should be slow to treat those couples as adversaries.

Two. Many embryo-handling practices can be reformed without banning the whole enterprise. Clinics can be encouraged to create only as many embryos as the family intends to use, to store surplus embryos carefully, and to offer embryo adoption, in which families who want a child receive embryos that others have no plan to use. Programs that match donated embryos with adopting families have existed for decades.

Three. A blunt legal rule declaring every embryo a full legal person, with immediate effect, could make it impossible for clinics to operate at all, since ordinary lab accidents and the ordinary handling of embryos could then become homicide or wrongful death. The law should aim at the real moral problems with precision and not with a sledgehammer.

Four. The political reality matters too. A movement that wants to win the argument about the unborn needs the trust of ordinary families, and many of those families have a friend, a sister or a neighbor who used IVF to have a child they love.

Is that a serious argument? Of course it is. It does not deny the dignity of the embryo; it argues about the means of protecting it. A good many pro-life legislators hold this view, and I know of no way to read their position as bad faith.

What the law can decide, and what it cannot

So much for the ethics. The law's job is narrower. It has to decide what happens when a freezer fails, when a couple divorces, when a clinic is sued. The law has three main tools.

Contract and property. Many states treat disputes about frozen embryos as contract questions: what did the couple agree to in the paperwork? A leading case is Davis v. Davis, decided by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1992, a divorce dispute about frozen embryos. The court declined to call the embryos either persons or ordinary property, put them in an interim category deserving special respect, and gave weight to the parties' wishes about whether to become parents. Not every state has followed that approach, but it shows how a court can handle the problem without deciding the metaphysics.

Personhood amendments. These write into a state constitution or statute that a person exists from fertilization. Voters in Colorado and in Mississippi have been asked to adopt such measures, and rejected them. The reason is not that those voters were hostile to the unborn. A rule that broad raises endless questions about everything from clinic practice to what counts as a death, and voters often prefer more specific laws.

Wrongful-death statutes. Many states let a family sue when a child is killed by someone else's negligence. Whether the child counts when unborn is a question of how each statute is written. This is the tool that came into play in Alabama.

Alabama, February 2024

The facts were grim and ordinary. Several couples had embryos stored at a clinic's cryogenic facility. A patient entered the unit, removed some of the frozen embryos and dropped them, destroying them. The couples sued under Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

On February 16, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court decided LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine. It held that the wrongful-death statute applies to unborn children, and that it makes no exception for embryos that are outside a woman's body. The court relied heavily on Alabama's own constitution, which since a 2018 amendment recognizes the sanctity of unborn life, and on the text of the statute itself. One justice's concurring opinion went further and offered a theological argument, which drew a great deal of attention.

Now, you can read that decision as a straightforward application of the statute the legislature wrote. I think that is the honest reading. The court did not ban IVF. It said that the law the state already had would cover these embryos. But the practical consequence landed fast: some clinics in the state paused services, because their lawyers could not tell them what liability a storage failure would now create. Families in the middle of treatment suddenly had no clinic.

That is the part conservatives should think hard about. Here was a court taking a pro-life statute at its word, and the result was a pile of couples who wanted children and could not get care. Whatever your position on the underlying question, nobody in that story was trying to hurt anyone.

The legislature's answer

Alabama's legislature moved with a speed that would embarrass most legislatures. The governor signed a bill on March 6, 2024, just 19 days after the decision (13 days left in a leap-year February after the 16th, plus 6 in March). The new law gave providers immunity, civil and criminal, for the damage to or death of an embryo in the course of IVF services.

Look at what that did and did not do. It did not overturn the court's reading of the wrongful-death statute as a statement about the status of the embryo. It protected the clinics from liability, so they could reopen. It was a patch, and an honest one, but a patch. The deeper question, what is an embryo in the eyes of the law, was left open.

I respect the legislators who passed it. They were facing families who needed help now. But the patch tells us something important: when a pro-life court reading and the practical needs of IVF collided, the answer was to protect the practice, not to resolve the principle. Critics on the church-teaching side say that shows the movement avoiding its own logic. Defenders on the access side say it shows the legislature doing exactly what responsible legislatures do: picking the narrow fix.

In that same year, Senate Democrats brought forward a bill to establish a federal statutory right to IVF, and Republicans offered their own proposals. It became a campaign skirmish more than a lawmaking effort. If you want to check any bill yourself, our bills page points you to the record, and Congress.gov has the text. Read the text, not the press release. The press release is written by someone whose job is to make the bill sound like a sunrise.

Where the disagreement really lives

Let me boil it down the way a debater would, because I think the argument turns on three questions.

1. What is the moral status of an embryo? The Church and the Southern Baptists say it is a person. Many defenders of access also say it deserves profound respect, but differ on how that translates into rules about handling and storing embryos.
2. Which instrument fits the problem? A constitutional personhood clause is a broad tool. A wrongful-death statute is a narrow tool. A regulation on how many embryos a clinic may create is a different tool again. Some countries have taken that path; Germany's Embryo Protection Act of 1990, for example, limits how many embryos may be created in a cycle.
3. Who bears the cost of a mistake? If the law is too lenient, embryos are discarded without anyone answering for it. If the law is too strict, couples are shut out and clinics close. A responsible position names both costs.

You will notice that nothing in this list requires me to call anyone's motives bad. Good. That is how it ought to be.

What this means for a family

If you are a conservative voter, here is the practical part. When a candidate says "I am pro-life and I support IVF," do not groan and do not cheer. Ask the follow-up. What should the law say about embryos that are not used? Should clinics be required to report how many are created and stored? Should there be incentives for embryo adoption? Do you want wrongful-death claims to cover frozen embryos or not?

If the answer is a slogan, you have learned something. If the answer is a specific policy, you have learned something better.

And on the personal side, whatever your family decides, treat the other families in your church or your neighborhood with grace. People who used IVF are not the enemy of the pro-life cause. People who object to its practices are not the enemy of families. If you want the larger framework for the pro-life argument, I walked through it in the pro-life argument in four premises and where each one gets attacked, and for the plain facts of what the Supreme Court did in 2022, see What the Dobbs decision actually decided, step by step and in plain English. For the questions that come up at the table when this subject does, there is twelve pro-life dinner-table questions and honest answers, and for why states end up with such different rules, why abortion law differs from state to state, mechanism by mechanism.

The bottom line

• This is a real disagreement between pro-life people, not a trap set by the other side. Both positions are held in good faith, and both deserve a fair hearing.
• The law has to answer what an embryo is. Contract law, personhood clauses and wrongful-death statutes answer it in different ways, and the choice of tool matters.
• Alabama's 2024 ruling and the 19-day legislative patch show how fast a principle can run into a clinic's practical needs. Watch for specifics, not slogans.
• Ask candidates to say what they would do about unused embryos, clinic oversight and embryo adoption. A vague answer is a vague answer.
• Talk about it with your neighbors the way you would want to be talked to. Nobody at the clinic is your enemy, and nobody in your pew is either.