A shocking new report has found that while the US abortion industry destroys roughly one million unborn babies a year, the number of unborn lives discarded annually by our largely unregulated IVF industry is four times higher.A recent press release from Liberty Counsel details the tragic extent of the waste of human lives currently taking place in IVF clinics across the United States. Based on 2024 data from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, IVF clinics reported that patients underwent more than 449,000 IVF cycles, with an average estimate of nine embryos created per cycle, for a total of more than 4 million embryos created. However, those 449,000 cycles resulted in slightly more than 100,000 live births. What happened to the rest of the four million embryos created? They were lost either at various stages of the pregnancy, frozen, or donated for scientific experimentation.
This enormous waste of human life was only for one year! In 2022, data showed similar numbers of created embryos – 3 million – with only 98,000 live births. This resulted in the loss of 2.9 million innocent lives.
While it is true that some of these embryos are frozen, these numbers are also growing annually. At present, anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5 million embryos are currently stored in cryopreservation across the country, ostensibly for future use, but only a minute fraction of these embryos will ever be thawed and implanted.
Sadly, the IVF industry is growing largely without any government oversight. Minimal regulations are giving rise to the phrase that the U.S IVF industry is the “wild west.” Unlike the U.S. adoption process and the regulated IVF standards in other nations, the U.S. and many states do not restrict who can commission IVF services or regulate the process itself. There are few, if any, regulations based on marital status, age, background screenings, surrogacy, how many embryos can be created, and how they are to be frozen and stored. In addition, what used to be seen as a last resort for infertile married couples, the IVF market is now seeing demand from LGBT couples and single individuals “purchasing gametes and hiring surrogates” to get babies.
As long as IVF clinics continue to operate as businesses where high volume and higher success rates are rewarded with financial gain, the U.S. IVF market is projected to exceed $15 billion annually by 2035.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Every human life begins as an embryo and has incalculable worth. The data makes a compelling case that the unregulated, commercialized IVF industry is destroying far more conceived lives than it births and even surpasses the elective abortion industry due to its high-volume scale per cycle. The U.S. IVF market needs regulation. Every unborn life should be protected, no matter their stage or location.”
The Church agrees. In 1987, she addressed this issue in an Instruction entitled, Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life) which teaches that “if a given medical intervention helps or assists the marriage act to achieve pregnancy, it may be considered moral; if the intervention replaces the marriage act in order to engender life, it is not moral.” Because IVF replaces the marriage act in order to engender life, the Church has unequivocally judged its use to be immoral.
The USCCB document entitled Begotten Not Made, written by Dr. John Haas, explains how the Church arrived at this conclusion: “Human beings bear the image and likeness of God. They are to be reverenced as sacred. Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest wishes of an infertile couple. Husbands and wives ‘make love,’ they do not ‘make babies.’ They give expression to their love for one another, and a child may or may not be engendered by that act of love. The marital act is not a manufacturing process, and children are not products. Like the Son of God himself, we are the kind of beings who are ‘begotten, not made’ and, therefore, of equal status and dignity with our parents.”
It goes on to cite the same horrors described in the above data, how this engendering of children through a technical process subjects them to “quality control” and eliminated if found “defective” by lab workers who set themselves up as “the giver of life and death by decree.”
The exact number of human embryos discarded by the U.S. fertility industry is unknown because no national registry tracks embryo disposition. However, given more than four decades of IVF practice, the number of human embryos that have been discarded or relegated to cold storage by this “death by decree” process can only be called staggering.
As Dr. Haas concludes, “In America we have a tendency to think that we can solve all problems with the right ‘technology.’ But children are not engendered by technology or produced by an industry. Children should arise from an act of love between a husband and wife, in cooperation with God. No human being can ‘create’ the image of God. That is why we say that human beings "procreate" with God. Engendering children is a cooperative act among husband, wife, and God himself. Children, in the final analysis, should be begotten not made.”
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