Earlier this month, I sat down with former vice president Mike Pence. We discussed Trump and the pro-life movement, among other things.
In April, Pence co-authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal with John Mize, in which he criticized the GOP-led Alabama legislature for granting total immunity to the IVF industry, consigning prospective parents and embryos to a “culture of IVF industry negligence.”
Pence and his wife struggled with infertility in the 1990s and have firsthand experience of the deep heartache it can cause. Nevertheless, he has been an outspoken critic of an unregulated IVF industry:
“To me, the objective is how we preserve access to fertility treatments but create a framework around that which recognizes the rights and interests of parents and protections for unborn life,” he says. Including embryos in IVF storage facilities? “Yes. I really believe that.”
Elsewhere, Pence has said that he and his wife used IVF. However, readers may be interested to know that what Pence and his wife used was gamete intrafallopian transfer (or GIFT):
He explains: “All of our procedures were gamete intrafallopian transfer [GIFT]. We happened to be Catholic at the time. And we took guidance from the church about that procedure. I described it [as IVF] in the book so that people would know what it was.”
In GIFT, gametes are placed directly into the fallopian tubes so that the couple’s sperm and egg might meet and conception occur as in a natural pregnancy. The procedure has success rates similar to those of IVF but is rarely performed in the United States. It requires the woman to undergo general anesthesia and laparoscopy. But it avoids the creation of extra or, in the industry jargon, “supernumerary” embryos that will be frozen or destroyed.
To most Americans, the distinction between GIFT and IVF may seem trivial. But to critics of the IVF industry’s handling of embryos, these details are significant. (For Catholics: GIFT with the married couple’s own gametes has the same status as embryonic adoption and intrauterine insemination by sperm obtained through intercourse and is neither approved nor prohibited by the church.)