Every Republican member of the Senate vowed their continued support for in-vitro fertilization, also known as IVF, despite ethical concerns with the controversial procedure.
All forty-nine Senate Republicans signed a statement accusing Democrats of mounting a “partisan campaign of false fearmongering” about their stance on IVF, a procedure in which a sperm and egg are artificially joined outside of the womb and implanted into the uterus of a woman. The lawmakers said they “strongly support continued nationwide access to IVF.”
The letter was released as the entire caucus, except for Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, voted against legislation introduced by Hawaii Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth to federally protect the procedure. They instead called on their colleagues to vote for separate legislation authored by Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt, which would withdraw federal healthcare funds from any state which enacts a prohibition on IVF.
Cruz and Britt both profess to be pro-life Christians, yet conservative Christians largely object to IVF since the process typically involves discarding, freezing, or selectively aborting fertilized embryos which are deemed unwanted or unviable by parents and doctors. Attendees of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest association of Protestant churches in the nation and a bulwark of conservative evangelicalism, passed a resolution at their annual meeting last week expressing sympathy toward parents struggling with infertility but saying “not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified.”
“That resolution merely extends the full force and logic of Southern Baptists’ underlying commitment to human dignity,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary ethics and public policy professor Andrew Walker said about the resolution. “Human embryos are human beings who bear God’s image at all stages of their development. We believe this consistently, or we do not.”
The vows from Republicans to federally protect IVF continues in the aftermath of an Alabama Supreme Court decision affirming that frozen embryos are indeed children who can be protected by wrongful death laws. Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker noted in his concurring opinion that the Bible and the historic Western legal tradition affirm the value of preborn children, yet members of the Alabama Legislature moved to pass a law providing those involved in IVF with “civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo.”
