Why You Should Care About Southern Baptists and IVF

They are a bellwether for where Evangelicals are headed. And they're coming for fertility medicine.

Photo by Jesus Loves Austin on Unsplash

Last week, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to collectively oppose the use of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and pressure lawmakers to curtail the procedure. Under the terms of the resolution, SBC members voted “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation, especially in the number of embryos generated in the I.V.F. process.” Instead of turning to assisted reproduction, the resolution urges couples struggling with infertility to “look to God for hope.” And, perhaps most importantly, the resolution does not simply call on Southern Baptists to change their personal behavior; it tells them to “advocate for the government to restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.”

In other words, this isn’t just an SBC resolution serving as guidance for faithful SBC members, who have now been told to not avail themselves of IVF. It is a call for Southern Baptists to try to impose their radical theology on the rest of us.

The SBC is the largest Evangelical group in the US. They are strongly anti-abortion, although that wasn’t always the case. According to a 1970 survey, a majority of Southern Baptists supported legal abortion under some circumstances, including for reasons of mental or physical health, rape, or incest. Throughout the 1970s, the SBC was a fairly restrained on abortion, adopting, in its own telling, “a middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.” By 1976 the group was clearer in its ideological opposition to abortion, but also in its “conviction about the limited role of government in dealing with matters relating to abortion.”

And generally, at least until the 1970s and 80s, opposition to abortion and contraception was less an Evangelical issue than a Catholic one. By 2021, the same SBC that said calling abortion murder was “extreme” was declaring “unequivocally that abortion is murder.”

There are a bunch of reasons why that changed, but the chief ones are segregation and the Supreme Court. The SBC exists because a large group of Southern Baptists so badly wanted to continue the practice of chattel slavery that they split from the Northern Baptists who opposed the practice. The founders of its seminary school were slave owners and avowed white supremacists. The SBC is an organization borne of American racism and its worst original sin, and ugly racism a tradition the SBC has carried on for decades. The SBC championed the Lost Cause of the South. It promoted racial segregation and Jim Crow. It opposed interracial marriage. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is among the most racist institutions in American history, and remains one of the most misogynist: Women still cannot attend as equals, and are instead directed to special programs for “seminary wives” (“an innovative program designed to prepare the wives of seminary students for their role in their husband’s ministry”) and women’s ministries.

It may not surprise you to learn that the SBC opposition to IVF began at its Theological Seminary, and is based on an ideology formed by exclusively male religious leaders. The SBC’s IVF resolution was written by two men, and introduced by those two men. One of those men, Albert Mohler Jr., the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told the New York Times that this isn’t just about theological clarification; it’s about political activism. “I want to do more than nudge Republicans who are against us on this,” he said. “I want to call them out for their error and inconsistency.”

It’s working: While many Republicans claim to support IVF, just days after the SBC vote, the party blocked a bill in Congress that would have protected the procedure nationwide.

I can’t find any documentation of how many of the more than 10,000 delegates to the SBC’s 2024 meeting were women. Looking at photos, though, it seems like the strong majority of people who voted on the IVF resolution were male.

The growing conservative hostility to IVF is part of a decades-long rightward shift among Evangelicals and Republicans on reproductive rights more broadly. The SBC came to oppose abortion just as its support for segregation was becoming culturally untenable. By the 1970s and 80s, more Americans were seeing racial segregation as the scourge it is, and support for SBC-supported things like segregated schools and anti-miscegenation laws had plummeted. The Civil Rights Acts gave the government new enforcement mechanisms to promote broader racial equality and cut into the ability of conservative states to discriminate against and disenfranchise African Americans. The SBC, and the “moral majority” Evangelical movement of which it is a part, were losing their race war. They needed a new wedge issue in the culture wars, and abortion was it.

One interesting thing about the SBC is that, while it has often looked at Catholicism skeptically or even hostilely, it seems to inevitably adopt Catholic theology and thinking around questions of sex, gender, and reproduction. It happened with abortion, it happened with contraception, and now it’s happening with fertility treatments, which Catholic leaders have long opposed. And the reasoning is the same: Procreation is supposed to occur within marriage, and as the result of sex between husband and wife (or as the SBC put it in its IVF resolution, “Biblical creation order portrays the embodied union of husband and wife as the singular normative expression for procreation”); and IVF often involves the discarding of embryos, which the Catholic Church says is tantamount to murder because human life begins at the moment of conception. This idea of embryonic personhood has also been adopted by many Evangelicals, the anti-abortion movement more broadly, and the SBC specifically.

They’re not wrong that IVF does often result in the creation and destruction of embryos — it’s a lot like sex and regular reproduction that way. When eggs are fertilized the old-fashioned way, roughly half of them naturally don’t implant and are flushed out of a woman’s system. Generally, this is because those embryos were genetically unsound in some way, and were not going to become healthy pregnancies. Something similar happens with IVF, except that it occurs in a lab. Technicians retrieve eggs and sperm cells, fertilize the eggs, and test the embryos that survive — and often find that some of them are unlikely to make it, just like traditionally-made embryos. Instead of implanting embryos that are unlikely to implant or likely to result in miscarriage, fertility doctors select the strongest ones, and discard those that are unlikely to live. This strikes me as imminently sane, humane, and not so different from what happens within the human body itself.

But if you believe that every fertilized egg is a person — the moral equivalent of a baby or a three-year-old or a 40-year-old — then discarding them is indeed tantamount to murder.

It’s worth saying here that virtually no one, including the Southern Baptists who voted for this resolution and the Catholics who oppose IVF, actually believes that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a born person. If they did, we’d see at least one iota of concern about the fact that half of humanity apparently dies shortly after coming into existence; we’d see Catholic and other religious institutions researching and demanding money for research into why half of all fertilized eggs — the tiniest humans — die before they can even implant in the uterus. No, natural death is not the same as intentionally causing the death of another. But humans have spent centuries and unfathomable amounts of time and money trying to prevent all kinds of natural deaths, and especially childhood deaths. We’ve been remarkably successful. And few people shrug off common and deadly childhood illness as simply natural and therefore not worth a dollar of funding or a minute of research. And yet that’s what “pro-life” groups and religious institutions seem to say about embryonic deaths.

Which can only mean that they really don’t consider these embryos to be children to begin with.

Unless, of course, we’re sitting in a broader landscape that affords women greater rights and freedoms. In those cases, suddenly, embryos are people. And women’s rights have to be constrained to protect them.

This is fairly straightforward when it comes to abortion and contraception, both innovations that do help families more broadly, but primarily benefit women. Both have been shown to increase education for women and girls, increase women’s economic independence, keep women and children alive longer, help women escape abusive relationships, allow women to work for pay, allow women to enjoy huge gains in equality and wellbeing. IVF initially looks more complex because it is so often used to help families have children, something religious groups generally promote. And many, many Evangelicals and Catholics have used IVF to have children — these are groups that, after all, highly value childbearing.

But IVF has also grown in popularity as more women have delayed marriage and childbearing, something religious conservatives see as a threat to the nuclear family. Even religious women are marrying later, often because they want to marry someone they actually love and want some modicum of independence before they tie the knot. I think this is a good thing, and it certainly makes for happier marriages. But if your theology holds that heterosexual marriage is really the only acceptable path to family formation and that the nuclear, male-headed family is the core organizing force of society and all other family make-ups should be heavily discouraged and are even deeply immoral, you don’t really care if marriages are happier; you care that they are common and compulsory.

People of all ages face infertility, but the biological reality is that fertility declines as humans age (men too!), and so IVF is more likely to be used by women in their late 30s and 40s. I don’t think women are waking up at 40 shocked that they forgot to get pregnant and then run to the IVF clinic. But I do think that the existence of fertility treatments takes some of the psychic pressure off of women to marry young, especially if they know they want kids. The knowledge that there are technologies that can help the reproductive process makes it a tiny bit easier for women to refuse to settle for less-than-great men because their church tells them that their biological clock is ticking every day they live past 25.

Constraining access to IVF, then, fits neatly with the broader “pro-life” aim of returning women and men alike to traditional gender roles, with men dominant and women subservient, dependent, and primarily valued for their reproductive capacity.

Unfortunately for the SBC and other conservative, misogynist religious groups, IVF is also really popular, including among religious conservatives and Republicans. But that has hardly stopped them before. The SBC, remember, was founded on the very premise of violent minority rule: They wanted a minority group of white men to sit atop the social, political, and economic hierarchy, and even have the right to force other human beings into slavery. They have spent decades pushing laws, policies, and norms that bar or discourage other groups from formal participation in various public spheres, and certainly from challenging white men for power or influence. That they are yet again advocating for a small minority — religious opponents of IVF — to determine morality, law, opportunity, and even basic freedom for everyone else is not some sort of aberration; it’s at the heart of the SBC’s very reason for existing.

Historically, the SBC has sometimes lost, like it did on slavery and segregation. More often, though, it’s been a bellwether for where Evangelical groups, and now by extension the Republican Party, are headed — that’s been the case on abortion, contraception, sex ed in schools, and a great many other issues in the sphere of family, gender, and reproduction. That they are taking up IVF at a moment when their movement has won on abortion in the Supreme Court but is getting pummeled in the court of public opinion shows pretty clearly that public opinion doesn’t discourage them, because this is an organization that has never favored democratic law-making. It simply wants its theology to govern. And it just showed us where the Evangelical anti-abortion movement expects the law to go.

xx Jill