President Donald Trump promised to lower costs and make it easier for young Americans to start families. However, the in vitro fertilization executive order he signed this week will not accomplish either of those things, and it will also inflame complex ethical matters and divide public opinion.
Trump’s order, “Expanding Access to In Vitro Fertilization,” and an accompanying Fact Sheet helpfully stress “the importance of family formation” and the need for public policy to “make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.” These are important goals that Trump is already furthering through other policy priorities, such as reducing illegal immigration, reforming permitting, and extending the child tax credit.
The Fact Sheet goes on to note correctly that “the general U.S. fertility rate is at another historic low,” which is a public policy matter that normally does not get enough attention from party leaders.
Unfortunately, Trump seems to believe that expanding “access” to IVF procedures will solve the problem. However, “access” is the same weasel word the Democratic Party used to dupe the public on Obamacare’s health insurance mandates. What expanding healthcare “access” means in practice is that millions of people are forced to pay premiums for what they don’t need or want.
Health insurance mandates are why insurance costs spiked for millions of people after Obamacare’s regulations became law. If Trump mandates private health insurance plans to cover IVF, premiums will spike again, and it will be his fault.
The executive order does mention “easing unnecessary statutory or regulatory burdens” on the IVF industry, but America’s current IVF industry is the least regulated in the world. Not only are IVF customers allowed to create and destroy human embryos for purely aesthetic or any other reason, but the standard of care for storing and handling human embryos in the United States is extremely lax compared to other countries. If anything, the IVF industry needs more federal regulation, not less.
To the extent that fertility is declining, and it is, IVF is not the answer. Japan has one of the world’s highest rates of IVF use, far higher than the U.S., and yet its fertility is below ours and also falling faster.
The answer to falling fertility is to make it easier for young adults to get married and stay married. The fall in birth rates is entirely caused by a decline and delay in marriage. Married couples have more children than single women do, and couples who get married earlier in life have more babies than couples who marry later.
Contrary to what Democrats claim, it would not take a return to the 1950s for America to reverse its native population decline. All that’s needed is to return to the average marriage rates and the average age of the 1990s, and our native population will grow again. In 1990, 56% of all households included a married couple compared to 46% today, while the average age at first marriage for women was 24 years old in 1990 compared to 28 years old today (in both decades, the average man was two years older than his bride in a first marriage).
Trump is already pursuing policies that make it easier for young people to get and stay married. Marriage has declined most among low-income men. Raising wages by decreasing the number of illegal immigrants willing to work for less money will make it easier for low-income women to find suitable husbands.
High housing prices have also been a marriage killer. Cities with high housing costs have lower marriage rates and smaller families than cities with low housing costs. Reforming federal permitting will make it easier and cheaper for developers to build homes, thus making it easier for young families to buy their first homes and start a family.
TRUMP IS MAKING THE SEPARATION OF POWERS GREAT AGAIN
If Trump really wants to boost fertility by raising the marriage rate, he could also eliminate the many marriage penalties in the federal government’s social safety net. Virtually every means-tested federal government program, from the Earned Income Tax Credit to Food Stamps to Medicaid, punishes poor women who want to marry the father of their children. Over a trillion dollars is spent by state and federal governments on programs that punish marriage. Before we subsidize the IVF industry, we should eliminate these marriage penalties.
Infertility is painful. However, there are other ways to form a family. There are hundreds of thousands of foster children waiting for loving homes. If someone prefers to pursue IVF, they are free to do so. However, taxpayers and everyone now paying healthcare premiums should not be forced to cover the extra costs. Trump should be doing everything he can to lower costs. IVF insurance mandates would do the opposite.
