News
Featured Image

LifeSiteNews has been permanently banned on YouTube. Click HERE to sign up to receive emails when we add to our video library.

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois, May 28, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Illinois lawmakers passed a bill redefining infertility to apply to homosexuals and single people and mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other infertility services for LGBT-identifying individuals.

Illinois House Bill 3709 amends the state insurance code to classify infertility as “a person’s inability to reproduce either as a single individual or with a partner without medical intervention,” or “otherwise based on a physician’s opinion.” Infertility is currently defined in Illinois law as, among other things, “the inability to conceive after one year of unprotected sexual intercourse.” 

Services that must be covered by healnsurers for single or LGBT individuals under the bill include “in vitro fertilization, uterine embryo lavage, embryo transfer, artificial insemination, gamete intrafallopian tube transfer, zygote intrafallopian tube transfer, and low tubal ovum transfer.” 

House Bill 3709 passed Illinois’s lower chamber 68-43 earlier this month, with the Republican House minority leader casting the sole GOP vote. The state senate also approved the bill on Thursday, though it has yet to be signed by the governor, a Democrat. 

Democrat Rep. Margaret Croke of Chicago, who sponsored the legislation, had suggested that the biological definition of infertility in Illinois law was “discriminat(ing) against people who do want to become parents.” House Bill 3709, in fact, ignores the reality that people are not “infertile” simply for having an “inability to reproduce” alone or with someone of the same sex. 

“No one has a ‘right’ to have covered any particular service that is not curative or preventive even when the general terms and conditions of that insurance policy cover superficially similar services that are medical treatments,” an article in The Federalist about HB 3709 noted last month. It added that “Illinois law already requires that Illinois insurance companies cover fertility services for couples who have attempted to conceive for a year(.)” 

By mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization for effectively anyone who wants it, Illinois is poised to accelerate an already highly unethical practice. IVF, which is recognized as illicit by the Catholic Church, frequently results in excess human embryos, many of which are subsequently destroyed. Millions of embryos may be abandoned or discarded at fertility clinics across the United States, according to Catholic News Agency. 

“One is struck by the fact that, in any other area of medicine, ordinary professional ethics and the healthcare authorities themselves would never allow a medical procedure which involved such a high number of failures and fatalities,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote in bioethical instruction published under Pope Benedict XVI. “The desire for a child cannot justify the ‘production’ of offspring, just as the desire not to have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.”

Same-sex adoption itself poses grave risks for children, as experts have attested. “Recent studies confirm that children reared by same-sex couples fare worse in a multitude of outcome categories than those reared by heterosexual, married couples,” the American College of Pediatricians has said. “(R)esearch has revealed that children reared in same-sex households are more likely to experience sexual confusion, engage in risky sexual experimentation, and later adopt a same-sex identity,” the group stated in a recent position paper.

Illinois nevertheless joins a host Democrat-run states such as New York in liberalizing insurance requirements in line with LGBT ideology. Along with Illinois, Washington also moved this year to conform health insurance plans to the LGBT agenda, enacting a law two weeks ago requiring transgender surgeries be covered by carriers.