SACRAMENTO, California (LifeSiteNews) – California is on the verge of enacting a new law that would require health insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments for single individuals and same-sex couples despite cost concerns from far-left Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s own administration.
SB 729, which passed the state Assembly 62-1 and state Senate 31-8, “would require large and small group health care service plan contracts and disability insurance policies issued, amended, or renewed on or after July 1, 2025, to provide coverage for the diagnosis and treatment of infertility and fertility services.”
Critically, this coverage “shall be provided without discrimination on the basis of age, ancestry, color, disability, domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.” It “shall not apply to a religious employer.”
“It will ensure that queer couples no longer have to pay more out of pocket to start families than non-queer families. It will increase access to care, help reduce inequities in health and economic status, and bring the law up to date on medical advancements in IVF and its uses,” declared bill author and Democrat state Sen. Caroline Menjivar of Panorama City, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Newsom, who has consistently enacted some of the most extreme pro-abortion measures in the country, has not yet said whether he will sign SB 729. Yet his own state Department of Finance previously warned that, because it would raise insurance premiums and is projected to cost $15 million-$80 million in just its first two years, it “creates costs and pressures not included in the administration’s spending plan.”
The IVF process is 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 after IVF and that as many as 93% of all embryos created through IVF are eventually destroyed. A 2019 NBC News profile of Florida fertility doctor Craig Sweet acknowledged that his practice has discarded or abandoned approximately a third of the embryos it places in cold storage.
Critics further argue that it denies the right of children to be conceived in the loving union of a husband and wife, and, in cases where it is used by singles and homosexuals, guarantees they will be raised without a mother or without a father.
IVF’s profile as a national issue rose earlier this year when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that, because frozen embryos are children under the law, their accidental destruction can be grounds for wrongful death lawsuits. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall soon confirmed he had no intention of prosecuting IVF clinics based on the ruling, and the state quickly enacted a new law protecting the industry.
In March, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) under the Biden administration announced it would “offer IVF benefits to qualifying Veterans regardless of marital status” and allow them to use donor sperm, eggs, or embryos, 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.
With just a handful of exceptions, most national Republicans have rushed to declare their support for IVF, fearing the political ramifications of being branded as opposing the practice, including former President Donald Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Last month, Trump declared that if elected in November he wants to mandate insurance coverage for IVF nationally.