WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Republican House members Matt Rosendale of Montana and Josh Breechen of Oklahoma are calling on the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to make sure the next National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) does not include funding to expand embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the U.S. military.
In March, the Biden administration Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that it “will offer IVF benefits to qualifying Veterans regardless of marital status” – i.e., single, homosexual, and/or gender-confused service members – and allow them to use donor sperm, eggs, or embryos, in a reversal of old rules that limited IVF to married service members whose military service led to a health condition making them infertile but still capable of producing their own eggs or sperm.
Rosendale, Breechen, and others objected at the time, and with a new GOP majority slated to assume control of Congress in January, they released a letter on Thursday to the top members of the committees in both parties, urging them not to include any provisions expanding IVF in the next annual appropriations for the armed forces.
“IVF is ineffective, leads to the destruction of innocent human life, and does nothing to treat the root cause of a couple’s infertility. For example, in 2021, there were around 4.1 million embryonic children created through IVF, but only 97,128 of those children were born.”
Of particular concern, they highlighted a House-passed provision called Section 701, calling it a “dramatic expansion of IVF that will cost taxpayers approximately $1 billion per year. While we have great sympathy for couples who are having difficulty starting a family, IVF is ineffective, leads to the destruction of innocent human life, and does nothing to treat the root cause of a couple’s infertility. For example, in 2021, there were around 4.1 million embryonic children created through IVF, but only 97,128 of those children were born. This means that only 2.3% of fertilized embryos resulted in a live birth.”
The letter noted that IVF remains “heavily unregulated” and “without ethical guidelines” in the United States, yet to date the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has not answered lawmakers’ “basic questions” about the industry.
READ: 3 House Republicans confront CDC about IVF industry’s ‘destruction of precious life’
“Congress must protect the most vulnerable in our country and reject any provision that leads to the destruction of innocent human life and expands our nearly $36 trillion debt,” the lawmakers concluded.
The IVF process is gravely unethical, as it entails the conscious creation of scores of “excess” human embryos only to be killed and unborn children being treated like commodities to be bartered over, in addition to separating sexuality from procreation.
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.
But despite the ostensibly pro-life party winning the 2024 elections, what kind of reception the letter will receive in the new Congress remains unclear. With just a handful of exceptions, most national Republicans rushed to declare their support for IVF after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos qualified as children in a wrongful death suit thrust the issue into the national spotlight.
Leading the charge was returning President Donald Trump, who has been casting himself as a “leader on fertilization” and has even promised to enact a new federal entitlement to IVF, whether through direct subsidy or insurance mandate (though he also suggested he would support religious exemptions to the latter).