When an Alabama court last year ruled against an in vitro fertilization clinic that carelessly allowed the destruction of frozen embryos, it set off a media feeding frenzy that ended in President Donald Trump taking a maximalist pro-IVF position.

One Catholic leader is trying to steer public officials in a different direction.

“In a misguided attempt to respond to challenges surrounding marriage, family formation, falling birth rates, and fertility,” Bishop Michael Burbidge of the diocese of Arlington, Virginia, writes, “elected officials are rushing to support an IVF industry that kills or freezes hundreds of thousands of embryonic children every year and facilitates the exploitative practice of surrogacy.”

Burbidge, in the apostolic letter released today , is responding to Trump’s campaign promise to make IVF free for would-be parents. This would involve forcing every insurer to cover 100% of the cost of IVF or putting the taxpayer on the hook for government-funded IVF.

Trump’s demand for 100% IVF coverage was fairly novel, but he was hardly the only Republican to rush in 2024 to embrace the procedure, whereby human sperm and egg are combined in a laboratory setting to create tiny humans, some of whom are implanted, as embryos, into the mother’s uterus.

The Catholic Church has always opposed IVF on many grounds, but the average Catholic doesn’t know or agree this Church teaching. In his letter, Burbidge gently lays out the objections to IVF and explains their rationale.

It’s a delicate topic because IVF is usually a couple’s last-ditch response to infertility, which is heartbreaking. Wanting a child with your own DNA is a natural instinct, and amid our baby bust , it’s hard to criticize those who are taking extraordinary measures to create offspring. But, as Burbidge argues, IVF is counter to human dignity and to the nature of marital love.

For starters, IVF typically creates “leftover embryos.” Those are unwanted humans in their embryonic stage, some of whom are discarded, some are experimented on, and most are simply left in limbo in an industrial freezer. “All children conceived and born through IVF possess inalienable human dignity,” Burbidge writes. “Indeed, their innate dignity is the reason for the Church’s opposition to their being instrumentalized and made into objects by means of IVF, which eugenically selects some to live and others to die.”

“The natural and loving embrace of man and woman expressed in marital love is effectively replaced by a laboratory procedure made possible by the subjugation of man and woman to a technological process. Pope Francis has frequently emphasized the risks to humanity of such a ‘technocratic paradigm,’ warning for instance that ‘technology represents a form of order in social relations and an arrangement of power.’ IVF subverts human dignity by reducing human persons—man, woman, and child alike—into objects of a technical process that threatens what the Holy Father has described as ‘the human being in his or her irreducible specificity.’”

Burbidge doesn’t call for the prohibition of IVF, but he argues that taxpayers and insurers shouldn’t be forced to pay for it. Also, the “Wild West” of IVF, especially when it involves commercial surrogacy, needs a lot more regulation.

The Trump administration includes many Catholics in very high positions, including the vice president. Hopefully they take the bishop’s words to heart.