Bishops said mandating insurance coverage for IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies violates human dignity, threatens religious freedom, and ignores restorative medical alternatives.
Catholic bishops are asking lawmakers to reject legislation that would mandate insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment that violates Catholic teachings on life and human reproduction.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sent a letter to Congress on April 29 laying out concerns with the bill (H.R. 8119), which its sponsor, Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, named Helping to Optimize Patients’ Experience (HOPE) with Fertility Services Act.
Under the bill, which has support from 18 Republicans and Democrats, insurance companies would face civil penalties of $100 per day if they offer plans that exclude coverage of IVF. The text does not clearly show any exemptions for religious employers, even though IVF is opposed by both the USCCB and the Southern Baptist Convention.
In the letter, the bishops express concern about the loss of embryonic human life integral to the IVF process, stating that, as practiced in the U.S., it “represents a relatively unregulated industry that creates hundreds of thousands or even millions of preborn children who will be interminably frozen, expended in
