How Do Americans Feel About In-Vitro Fertilization?

And how are their views of IVF shaped by other factors?

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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Whenever I teach a course in public policy, I make sure to emphasize the point that a change in the law can have a lot of downstream effects. Some of those can be predicted, while others cannot.

Take the issue of abortion, for instance. For decades, under the framework of Roe v. Wade, states were prohibited from outlawing abortion during the first trimester. When the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) overturned Roe with the Dobbs decision, most Americans could have easily predicted what would happen in the immediate aftermath - several states would outlaw abortion at a much earlier stage of pregnancy. This prediction came true with the Guttmacher Institute writing that 24 states have effectively banned abortion or planned to do so within six months of the Dobbs ruling being handed down.

However, in just the last few weeks, there has been another implication of Dobbs that I don’t think the average American would have seen coming. In 2020, a couple sued a hospital in Alabama that had removed their frozen embryos from cold storage and dropped them on the floor. The couple argued that this amounted to the wrongful death of a minor child. On February 20th, the Supreme Court of the State of Alabama agreed, writing that those embryos constituted persons who were entitled to the same rights as any other child.

Now, hospitals in Alabama are reeling. Several clinics have thousands of frozen embryos in their facility and are not exactly sure how they should proceed. Many hospitals in the state have suspended the in-vitro fertilization process fearing legal consequences. However, the state's attorney general has stated that he has no intention of prosecuting families or providers who engage in IVF.

The decision by the Alabama Supreme Court has been roundly criticized by even conservative politicians. This list includes the governor of Alabama, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and former President Donald Trump. It seems that this is a bridge too far for some politicians who applauded the Dobbs decision.

But what does the average American think about the issue of in-vitro fertilization? Fortunately, I found relevant questions in the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) when searching through their data. And I managed to find a survey called the Religious Understanding of Science which was fielded in December of 2013 and January of 2014. I know that the data is a decade old, but I can’t imagine views of IVF have changed radically over the last ten years.

The question is posed using the framework of moral acceptability. I excluded people who refused to answer the question (1.5%) and those who said that they were not aware of the issue (8.2%). Here are the results from those who had an opinion.

About a third of people don’t even see IVF as being a moral issue at all, which is an interesting addition to the discourse on this topic. But the data is pretty clear on this - a lot more Americans find IVF to be morally acceptable than morally wrong. 27% think it’s always morally acceptable and the same share think it’s acceptable in most cases. In contrast, only 6% find it to be always morally wrong and 8% believe it to be morally wrong in most cases. To summarize, 54% think it’s generally morally acceptable and 14% believe it to be morally wrong.

But how does this compare to the public’s views on other issues that could potentially fall into this somewhat gray area of science and morality? The survey has a ten question battery that asks about the morality of things like human cloning, physician assisted suicide, and destroying human embryos to help scientists find cures to diseases. Here is how the public shakes out on these topics.

It’s pretty evident that there are some topics that the public finds to be morally wrong. Nearly three quarters of respondents believe that it’s morally wrong to create a designer baby or clone a human being. There’s a fair amount of ambivalence on questions related to destroying embryos to advance science, euthanasia, or allowing abortion for any reason.

However, in the list of these ten topics the data points to the conclusion that IVF is one area in which there is very little opposition. The other issues that fall into this same general pattern is using stem cells for medical research, using technologies to identify diseases in utero, and performing an abortion if a woman’s life is in danger. In each case, moral opposition never reaches 25%.

But let’s pivot back to the IVF question now. I wanted to try and tease out what factors made someone believe that IVF was morally wrong and how that compared to those other topics that were described above. Of course, political ideology is a good place to start. So, I broke the sample into liberals, moderates, and conservatives and calculated the share who thought each issue area was morally wrong at least some of the time. Here are the findings.

One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that conservatives are more likely to say these medical techniques are morally wrong. In most cases the gap between liberals and conservatives is 20-30 percentage points. That’s true for any question that involves abortion, but it’s also clear that conservatives express more opposition to things like designer babies and cloning, too. The gaps are smaller when looking at things like stem cell research and using reproductive technology to screen for diseases in utero.

In terms of in-vitro fertilization, the data is hard to ignore. Of l0 issues, it faces the least amount of moral opposition. Only 7% of liberals think that IVF is morally unacceptable. It’s 14% of moderates and only 18% of conservatives. Thus, this data helps us understand why several prominent Republican leaders have come out in opposition to the IVF ruling in Alabama - over three quarters of the Republican base has no issue with its use.

What could be driving opposition to IVF? Well after politics, the next place to look would be religion. There’s a question that I found to be interesting about a respondent’s view of religion. The response options were: there is very little truth in any religion, there are basic truths in many religions, or there is truth only in one religion. How does belief in the certainty of religion relate to views of IVF?

Among those who think that in-vitro fertilization is always morally acceptable, the vast majority believe in the idea that many religions speak to the same basic truth (79%). As views of IVF move from morally acceptable to morally wrong, the absolutist view of religion continues to increase. However, that increase is not huge.

Consider this: among people who say that IVF is always morally wrong, over half (56%) say that there are basic truths in many religions. In contrast, just 39% of them say that there is truth in only one religion. To say that IVF opponents anchor their viewpoint in a clear religious conviction is not empirically true based on this data. Instead, it seems that opposition to in-vitro fertilization is not rooted in primarily religious justifications.

But I wanted to probe this IVF question one more way. The argument that I have seen a lot on Twitter is that in-vitro fertilization is morally wrong because when a sperm meets an egg, that creates a human life. The belief that life begins at conception is the moral foundation for the opposition to abortion, as well. So, does that show up in the data? Do people who say that abortion is always morally wrong also say that IVF is morally unacceptable?

The top row of the heatmap is folks who say that abortion for any reason is always morally wrong. If you look across that row, you can see how that group of individuals feel about IVF. About 37% of people who are morally opposed to abortion say that IVF is morally acceptable. One third of them think that IVF is not a moral issue at all. Only 30% of those who think abortion is always morally wrong also think that in-vitro fertilization is wrong in most cases. Thus, I don’t see strong evidence here that views of abortion and views of IVF run along the same lines - just the opposite, in fact.

When looking at all these results in a broad sense, a few things emerge. The first is that the vast majority of Americans (less than 20%) have no moral issue with in-vitro fertilization. Among all the issues that the survey asked about IVF is the one that seems to generate the least amount of controversy. And even among Republicans, there is a very small contingent who are morally opposed. It makes sense that the GOP has mobilized so quickly to speak out in opposition to the Supreme Court of Alabama.

But it’s also kind of hard to parse where the opposition to IVF comes from. There’s some evidence that part of the opposition is rooted in religious conviction. But even then, only 40% of those who think IVF is always morally wrong believe that truth can only be found in one religion. So, religious certainty is not the motivating factor for those opposed to IVF. And, there’s also little evidence here that a huge swath of the public has a consistent view about when life begins. Among people who think abortion is always morally wrong, there are more who favor IVF than oppose it.

I think the last few days have been helpful for scholars who study issues related to abortion, in-vitro fertilization, and other topics related to pregnancy and childbearing. Among the contingent of Americans who favor significant restrictions on abortion, there are some who would extend their logic to IVF. But that seems to be a minority viewpoint. The voting public seems to believe that IVF is a good thing and see little reason to make it illegal.

Code for this post can be found here.