In a New York Times op-ed, Anna Louie Sussman laments: “As more people seek fertility treatment, this necessary care remains out of reach for a significant share of the population.” She does not quite argue that everyone—married or single, old or young, male or female—should have the opportunity to bear children. But she does contend that “more people need help to build their families,” and wants to “push back against the narrow and exclusionary vision of the family that many on the right are promoting.”
To be a family implies having children, and Sussman tells us:
New constellations of families — older moms, same-sex parents, single dads — have flourished. This is one of the major scientific success stories of modern life.
When she calls for “recognizing family life as a human right,” then, Sussman intends that all those “new constellations” should have access to “fertility care”— that is, in vitro fertilization— since Mother Nature has conspired to deny them their right to bear children. Sussman’s essay decries efforts to restrict IVF as “thinly veiled attempts to assert a particular vision of the family.”
What is noteworthy about this op-ed, however, is not the argument for a redefinition of the family. Progressives won that cause with the Obergefell decision. Now the Times goes one giant step further, opening the discussion of whether universal access to IVF should be recognized as a human right.
Leave aside, for the moment, the moral issues involved with IVF. Leave aside the systematic creation and destruction of millions of human lives. Leave aside the right of the child to know that he was conceived in an act of love, and to grow up in a household with a mother and father. For now let us concentrate on what Sussman acknowledges as a limitation on the use of IVF: money.
“Fertility care is still so unevenly available that it feels almost like entering a lottery, in which the state you call home, the company that employs you, or your relationship status determines whether or not you become a parent,” Sussman observes. Only the rich, or those with very generous (and “woke”) health-insurance plans can afford the procedure. Whereas if it is a fundamental right, then— so the logic of the Left goes— the government must ensure it.
But our government cannot offer IVF coverage to everyone without blowing up the budget, nor can the health-care industry foot the bill without ruinous increases on insurance premiums. Moreover, no sane society will approve of IVF coverage for everyone without exception. Surely coverage would not be extended to convicted child molesters, to elderly dementia patients, to the very old and the very ill. So this newly conceived right— the right to conceive— would perforce come with some limitations.
And who would set those limitations? The health-insurance administrators? The government bureaucrats? The courts? Certainly not Mother Nature of Nature’s God, who have been shoved out of the picture entirely. The right to have children would become a political issue.
Suppose a couple— or for that matter an individual— already had several children, conceived by IVF. Would the government be ready to approve the expenses of conceiving another? If not, on what grounds would the application be denied? Since of course it would be terribly impolite, under this new regime, to imply that IVF parents are in any way different from natural parents, how could the policy be crafted to limit the number of IVF children in a family, without implying that all families should observe the same limits?
Sussman rightly detects a whiff of eugenics in our current system— she terms it “fertility discrimination”— which enables only the rich to produce children by artificial means. But any system that limits access— as it must— will set some standards for applicants. And once those standards are set, it is only a small further step to suggest that anyone who wants to have children should be subject to the same standards.
In short this Times op-ed is not only calling for consideration of universal access to IVF. It should also be recognized as a warning shot: a early indication that sometime in the future, the next debate will be on licensing the “right” to bear children.
What an excellent essay.
You can bet that the legislature in our blue state (WA) will devise legislation that the governor will sign to make IVF available to all adults and paid for by taxpayers. And the weak bishops here will be silent.