Equipping the Church for the IVF Era

When Anna, a pianist at her local church, began to show the unmistakable signs of pregnancy, her elders assumed it was unplanned and prepared to offer her counseling and support. They were shocked by what she told them. This was not an unplanned pregnancy at all, Anna explained lightheartedly. She was carrying a child as a surrogate for her sister-in-law, who had endured infertility and recurrent miscarriages. “There is nothing immoral or unbiblical about this pregnancy,” she assured them.

The elders were at a loss for words. They knew that the church had not directly addressed this issue before and that Anna hadn’t spoken to any of the pastors or leaders about it. What should they make of Anna’s choice? Was it a model to commend to Christian women? Or was it a practice to be lovingly but firmly corrected?

C. Ben Mitchell shared this case study at the June 2026 launch of the Anglican Bioethics Center, and it reflects the real state of many churches today. Congregants are making weighty decisions about infertility and reproductive technology without ever hearing their church speak to them, and church leaders are unsure what to say and how to act when faced with those decisions. 

Christians can no longer afford to be silent, especially as the issue moves front and center in the national political debate. In 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are persons thrust in vitro fertilization into the national spotlight, and both presidential candidates rushed to claim the “pro-IVF” mantle. 

I believe that 2024 may prove to be for IVF what 1973 was for abortion: a wake-up call to evangelicals and the beginning of a national movement to consistently honor life from the moment of conception. 

Indeed, when the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, it was not that pastors lacked biblical conviction, per se, but that many simply lacked the knowledge or resources needed to address abortion head-on. To make matters worse, many people viewed abortion as a personal issue, not a political or pastoral one.

While many in the Roman Catholic Church held the line, this uncertainty among Protestants had consequences. It took a generation of theologians, pastors, and teachers to recover what the Church should have known all along: that questions about human life are not political questions dressed in theological clothing. They are theological questions that happen to have real political implications.

We are at a similar inflection point with IVF. Once again, many pastors and Christians are not quite sure what to say—Anna’s elders are hardly alone. Roughly one in six adults now faces infertility, and congregants are hungry for guidance.

A study released by the Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview found that strong majorities of adults want their churches to offer additional worldview training on social and political responsibility (79 percent), abortion and the value of life (71 percent), and human sexuality (68 percent). And yet a 2018 survey from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity found that pastors “were least comfortable with counseling on infertility,” while a 2014 survey sponsored by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and Concordia Seminary found that more than 82 percent of pastors felt they needed better resources to advise congregants about IVF. Across the board, studies have found that pastors want and need additional resources to equip them to address these issues. 

Moreover, an informal 2025 survey of nearly two hundred lay Christians conducted by writer Haley Baumeister found that Protestant respondents overwhelmingly described a near-total silence in their churches on fertility, contraception, and reproductive technology, leaving couples to “make things up as we went” or default to the surrounding culture’s practices. Their most common request was strikingly modest: They simply want their churches to talk about these things in premarital counseling, from the pulpit, and through practical and tangible resources from their pastors. 

The Church needs to preach the good news of biblical anthropology. This good news speaks directly to infertility and reproductive technology, as Christians consider the ways these technologies sever the package deal of marriage, sex, and children; commodify human life; and press the Church to reflect even more deeply on what it means to be “begotten, not made.” 

It would be easy to highlight instances of designer babies, three-parent embryos, and screening technologies that promise intended parents the ability to choose the healthiest, smartest, and best-looking human embryo. But what about the couples sitting in church pews who, unbeknownst to us, are struggling with infertility or bearing the weight of painful health conditions? What would you tell your spouse if she shared she was struggling with infertility? Your daughter? Your cousin? Your friend?

Thankfully, a growing number of resources are available to equip pastors and Christians for these questions. As Ben Mitchell illustrated with the story of Anna, case studies provide a fruitful starting point, especially in churches where families may already be in the middle of IVF or surrogacy and where pastors themselves may still be seeking answers. Case studies offer concrete scenarios for church leaders, small groups, and congregations to wrestle with the biblical, ethical, and practical dimensions of these questions before jumping into direct teaching. And their use avoids blindsiding anyone in the church. 

Beyond this, there are three essential resources that I commend to pastors, church leaders, and Christians who are ready to go deeper. The Anglican Bioethics Center, launched to equip pastors and church leaders, offers articles on a range of topics: beginning and end of life, AI, IVF, surrogacy, egg and sperm donation, embryo adoption, contraception, and genetic testing. Each article includes biblical grounds for its judgments and medical or technical explanations, and ends with tools for pastoral application, including practical questions and resources to guide counseling sessions. 

My own project, Rethinking Fertility, aims to equip Christians to take the pro-life fight to Big Fertility, offering resources through a podcast and Substack under the same name. The main website includes a “Help and Hope” section that addresses practical questions, including where to start if you’re struggling to get pregnant or thinking about or recovering from IVF. The organization is also in the process of fundraising for a first-of-its-kind documentary on Frozen Orphans.

Katy Faust and her team have produced a series of videos and other resources drawn from their book Them Before Us for churches to use in small groups or as part of staff training. The series is a great education in the natural law principles and biblical theology needed to reason faithfully about these issues.

Also worth mentioning are Joshua D. Holler’s Misconceiving IVF: An Essential Guide to the Perils of In Vitro Fertilization; Matthew Arbo’s Walking Through Infertility: Biblical, Theological, and Moral Counsel for Those Who Are Struggling; and Matt and Ann Marie Yocum’s Couples Infertility Support Guidebook: Navigating Infertility through a Biblical Worldview.

In 1973, Christians began building the pro-life movement as we know it. Now it is time to continue this fight not only for unborn children in the womb, but for the millions of human embryos created, selected, frozen, and destroyed each year by IVF. As Christians continue to rethink infertility, it is time for pastors and local churches to equip their congregations, especially those experiencing infertility, to walk in the good news of biblical anthropology.