Pray for an end to IVF and the protection of human embryos: Join our prayer pledge
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Democrat president and self-described “Catholic” Joe Biden said this week that he disagrees with his Church’s teaching on in vitro fertilization (IVF), the subject of his party’s latest full-court press against pro-lifers and Republicans.
On Thursday, EWTN White House correspondent Owen Jensen pressed Biden on IVF outside of the White House in light of the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling recognizing frozen embryos as children. “The Catholic Church says IVF is immoral and wrong because it destroys countless human embryos. What do you say to that?” he asked.
“I don’t agree with that position,” the president answered simply before walking away.
ICYMI: @BishStrickland urged politicians to be guided by the sanctity of life at @CPAC 2024#prolife #catholic #CPAC2024 pic.twitter.com/T2dabIjUx6
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) February 29, 2024
Since the Alabama ruling, IVF industry apologists and allies in the abortion lobby have quickly acted to make IVF a national issue, while Democrats have attempted to stoke voters’ fears about IVF restrictions and use the opportunity to advance their anti-life agenda.
The Catholic Church teaches, based on the natural law, that IVF is gravely immoral because it separates the sexual act from procreation and violates the right of the child to be born of a conjugal union.
The process is also fraught with ethical peril, as it entails the conscious creation of scores of “excess” embryonic humans only to be killed and human lives being treated like commodities to be bartered over. It has been estimated that more than a million embryos are frozen in storage in the United States following IVF, and that as many as 93 percent of all embryos created through IVF are eventually destroyed. A 2019 NBC News profile of Florida IVF practitioner Craig Sweet acknowledged that his practice has discarded or abandoned approximately a third of the embryos it places in cold storage.
Early in his Senate career, Biden had a pro-life record, condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and repeatedly supporting restrictions on public funding of abortion; in 1982, he was one of only two Democrats to support a proposed constitutional amendment that would have overturned Roe.
But as the years went on, his voting record grew more aligned with the abortion lobby and the needs of Democratic Party politics. While campaigning for president in 2019, Biden disavowed the Hyde Amendment against federal abortion funding after just one day of pressure from his left-wing base, jettisoning the last vestige of his pro-life past and putting the finishing touch on his status as an absolutist for nationwide, unlimited, subsidized abortion.
Today, the Biden administration touts a “whole-of-government effort to protect reproductive rights” (a popular euphemism for legal abortion on demand), including increased taxpayer funding for abortion at home and abroad and attempted waiving of federal safety rules against distributing abortion pills by mail. Biden has called on Congress to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law, which would not only restore but expand the Roe status quo by making it illegal for states to pass virtually any pro-life laws.
As for how all of the above squares with his professed faith, Biden told the Jesuits’ America magazine in 2015 that he was “prepared to accept as a matter of faith – my wife and I, my family,” that “at the moment of conception there’s human life and being. But what I’m not prepared to do is to impose” a “rigid” or “precise” view on the issue that is “born out of my faith, on other people who are equally God-fearing, equally as committed to life.”
The Catholic Church, however, proclaims that the right to life of every innocent person from conception to natural death is a truth knowable by reason and contained in the natural law. The Church further teaches that politicians have a grave obligation to oppose laws that violate the right to life, including laws permitting abortion.
In 2021, Biden stated that he does not, in fact, believe that life begins at conception.
Biden also rejects fundamental Catholic teaching on various other issues, including marriage, family, gender, and contraception.
READ: Biden has violated fundamental Catholic teaching at least 32 times, report to bishops says
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions, but IVF is permitted everywhere in the country, and even most pro-life politicians generally steer clear of the issue.
Pro-life activists hope, and pro-abortion activists fear, that the Alabama ruling could force the beginning of conversations about expanding recognition and protection of the preborn to those created and discarded by IVF. Yet many Republicans, including former President and presumptive 2024 nominee Donald Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, have rushed to declare their support for IVF.
RELATED
Biden moves to block Texas from restricting transgender procedures for kids
Pray for an end to IVF and the protection of human embryos: Join our prayer pledge