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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The next National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will not include funding to expand embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization (IVF) among U.S. military members, Congress has agreed.
In March, the Biden administration Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced that it “will offer IVF benefits to qualifying Veterans regardless of marital status” – including single people, homosexuals, and gender-confused individuals – 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.
A handful of House Republicans objected at the time, and with a new GOP majority slated to assume control of Congress in January, they released a letter last month 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, particularly a House-passed provision called Section 701, calling it a “dramatic expansion of IVF that will cost taxpayers approximately $1 billion per year.”
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.
Over the weekend, lawmakers released a final 1,813-page NDAA that represents compromise on numerous points between both parties and both chambers of Congress. Among them is that no proposal to expand IVF in the armed forces has been adopted.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) expressed frustration at the outcome, but took solace that Democrats managed to exclude “all sorts of harmful riders that would have curtailed the ability of women in uniform” to obtain abortions.
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.
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.
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