'Support for IVF access ought to lead to support for abortion access,' medical ethicist says

• Reproductive health expert has written a JAMA opinion piece on the relationship between IVF and abortion
• IVF vs. abortion by the numbers available below

CHICAGO --- On February 18, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that gave the assistant to the president for domestic policy 90 days to provide a list of policy recommendations to protect in vitro fertilization (IVF) access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.

As of this week, those 90 days are up.

Northwestern University medical ethicist, reproductive health expert and constitutional scholar Katie Watson, JD, is available to speak to reporters covering this next chapter of IVF in the U.S.

Watson also wrote an opinion piece, “Rethinking the ethical and legal relationship between IVF and abortion,” that was published May 22 in JAMA.

“U.S. voters have elected a president who promised he would make the government or private insurance cover IVF, yet takes credit for reversing Roe v. Wade,” Watson writes in the JAMA Viewpoint piece.

“Those who see IVF and abortion as ethically distinct often focus on differences in intention and outcome — having a baby vs. avoiding having a baby. Others see them as comparable practices because both destroy embryos. I offer a third perspective, which is that abortion and IVF are comparable practices because both are family-building medical interventions; therefore, support for IVF access ought to lead to support for abortion access.”

A professor of medical education, medical social sciences and obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Watson also is the author of Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law and Politics of Ordinary Abortion. To schedule an interview with her, contact Kristin Samuelson.

“Modern medicine has made embryo destruction part of many people’s parenting journey,” Watson writes in the piece. “Clinicians and policymakers would be wise to resist divisive snapshot thinking that freezes patients in one moment of their life, dividing abortion and IVF patients into two distinct groups with different intentions and outcomes. Instead, they should engage in lifespan thinking, which broadens understanding from today’s pregnancy to a person’s lifetime reproductive goals and results.”

Watson can speak about:

• Why abortion and IVF have been regulated so differently

  • Ex: Shortly after Roe v Wade was reversed, the traditionally anti-abortion state of Indiana began its statute criminalizing abortion provision by clarifying “This article does not apply to in vitro fertilization,” Watson cites in the piece.
• The financial interests of preserving the legality of IVF
  • At a median cost of $19,200 per cycle, infertility care generates approximately $8 billion per year in gross revenues in the U.S., she writes in the piece.
• The ways in which abortion also helps to create or preserve families
  • Fifty-five percent of abortion patients are already mothers, and in one study, 50% of patients said their abortion would benefit their existing or future children. “IVF and abortion both allow women to change nature’s course and take control of their reproductive destiny,” she writes in the piece.
• How support for IVF is complicated by pronatalism, and “the fact that IVF is socially coded as the reproduction of middle- and upper-class white people”

IVF vs. abortion by the numbers (according to Watson’s JAMA Viewpoint):

• Approximately 63% of embryos created in IVF in the U.S. are discarded outside a uterus, and depending on patient age, 56% to 90% of frozen embryos transferred into a uterus perish before a live birth
• Eighty-one percent of fertility patients have household incomes of more than $100,000 and 75% are white. Contrasted with 72% of abortion patients have incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty line and 59% are Black or Latinx
• Sixty-four percent of IVF patients are 35 years or older, while 70% of abortion patients are in their teens or 20s
• Fourteen percent of births to women with a college or graduate degree were conceived with the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART), but only 1.5% of births to women with some college or less were conceived with ART in 2023. In contrast, 77% of abortion patients have some college or less.