WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The Trump administration announced a new proposal to establish new supplemental insurance options for fertility procedures, including embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Formally announced by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the proposed rule “would establish a new category of limited excepted benefits” (exemption from regulations under Obamacare and other federal health laws) to “expand the ability of employers to offer meaningful fertility benefits to their employees.” Capped at a combined lifetime maximum of up to $120,000, “(s)ubstantially all of the benefits must be for diagnosis, mitigation, or treatment of infertility or related reproductive health conditions.”
“It’s a big deal,” President Donald Trump said Monday at the White House. “They were not properly taken care of. (Republican U.S. Sen.) Katie Britt (of Alabama) knows that better than anybody, who called me and said, I must say I shouldn’t admit this, but the first time I really heard about the fertility was through Katie. She said, ‘Sir, we have to do something’ and I’m a quick study. So, I learned everything there is to learn, and about three or four minutes and I became the father of fertility. That is true. No, it just made a lot of sense to me.”
President Trump: “(T)oday, I am pleased to announce that the Department of Labor is issuing a new rule to formally create a fertility benefit option for employers that can be offered to all employees outside of their normal health insurance plans. It’s a big deal. They were not… pic.twitter.com/sQC23YKRrW
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 11, 2026
“She explained it well, and I hope you tell that story,” Trump continued. “What happened to you that you were virtually attacked with a bad — with a bad ruling from a court? They gave a very bad ruling, as you remember, in Alabama,” referring to the Alabama Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that frozen embryos qualified as children in a wrongful death suit, which thrust the issue into the national spotlight.
The IVF process 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 IVF practitioner Craig Sweet acknowledged that his practice has discarded or abandoned approximately a third of the embryos it places in cold storage.
Yet the political lines of the issue were blurred in 2024 after the Alabama Supreme Court ruling. Most national Republicans rushed to declare their support for IVF (with just a handful of exceptions). Leading the charge was Trump, who cast himself as a “leader on fertilization” and 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).
The White House eventually backed away from the idea of mandating IVF but said it still wanted to find a way to deliver on Trump’s campaign pledge. Last October, Trump announced he had struck a deal to reduce IVF costs and increase IVF “access” by (among other actions on lower prices for fertility drugs) by creating a new benefit option specifically covering IVF and other fertility treatments for employers to offer their employees.
As the argument over restricting such practices rages on, some groups advocate trying to alleviate the harm already done by promoting so-called “snowflake adoptions,” the adoption of already-conceived “excess” embryos at risk of staying frozen indefinitely or eventually being destroyed. Others, however, argue that such adoptions are a morally impermissible form of surrogacy under Catholic doctrine. Over the years, LifeSiteNews has published a series of articles representing the debate between both perspectives.
In an April 29 letter, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) argued that “grief for the growing number of families suffering infertility” should not lead to supporting IVF but rather “life-affirming, but often overlooked, restorative reproductive medicine.”
“Restorative reproductive medicine involves deeper and more comprehensive diagnostic studies, and more detailed cycle monitoring than a typical workup, to inform surgical, hormonal, and/or even lifestyle treatments that frequently work to truly heal patients,” the bishops explained. “These practices, and additional research to strengthen them, warrant support and awareness. Patients and hopeful parents deserve no less. IVF in contrast, especially as practiced in the United States, represents a relatively unregulated industry that creates hundreds of thousands or even millions of preborn children who will be interminably frozen, expended in attempts to place them within a mother, or discarded and killed (often in a selective, eugenic manner).”