When I sat down with Emma Waters, Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, I expected to learn about policy. What I didn’t expect was her jarringly accurate description of the state of American fertility law. “The best way to categorize the governance of the fertility industry and of IVF in particular,” she told me, “is that it’s under-regulated and unaccountable.”
That single sentence sums up the crisis at the heart of this issue.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) creates human embryos outside the body; the vast majority of those are never carried to full term. Using 2021 CDC data, Waters walked me through the math: roughly 400,000 IVF cycles were performed that year, producing only about 97,000 live births. If each cycle creates an average of 10 embryos, as she estimated, that’s well over 2 million embryos created in a single year alone. Some of those were destroyed. Some were used in research. Many were simply frozen indefinitely, with no plans for their future.
Penny Nance, the Chief Executive Officer and President of Concerned Women for America, emphasizes the unchecked nature of the IVF industry saying, “The fertility industry is just like any other industry. They do not want regulation of any sort. Our position is: This is not right. There needs to be ethical standards for fertility companies.”
Today, an estimated 1.5 million embryos sit frozen in storage across the country. Fewer than 10% of patients ever donate their unused embryos.
The problem, Waters explained, comes down to a federal law that was never built to handle these sorts of issues. The only federal law directly governing IVF is the Center for Disease Control’s Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act of 1992. It requires the roughly 450 certified fertility clinics in the U.S. to report their cycle numbers, pregnancies, live births, whether eggs used were fresh, donor, or frozen, and certain birth outcomes. But notice what is missing: the law never asks what happens to the embryos themselves.
Worse, there is no real enforcement behind any of it. Waters explained that if a clinic submits inaccurate numbers, there is little the federal government can do to hold them accountable. Because success rates are one of the biggest reasons patients choose one clinic over another, that gap creates a dangerous potential for fraud. As Waters put it, “It leaves a lot of ambiguity for how fertility clinics report their numbers and report their success rates,” so “there’s a lot of incentives to make your numbers look a lot better than they are.”
Beyond that reporting law, she added, the only other federal rules are FDA regulations covering the preservation and transportation of eggs, sperm, and embryos. But these crucial questions, such as how many embryos are destroyed, frozen indefinitely, or genetically screened for sex or health outcomes, are not directly governed by any federal law. Nor does the federal government have an official definition of the human embryo that recognizes it as a human person. As Waters summarized it: “On the whole, it really is a free-for-all practice when it comes to IVF.”
Still, Waters pointed to real, recent progress. In June 2026, HHS renewed its Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services grant program with new language that, for the first time, explicitly treats embryos as human lives deserving “best interest of the child” consideration, not property. Waters called it “a radical shift” in how federal agencies talk about embryos, one that could shape future policy far beyond the grant itself.
Embryo adoption programs, pioneered by organizations like Nightlight Christian Adoptions, already apply real child-welfare standards to embryo placement: home studies, background checks, and a genuine best-interest-of-the-child process. A 2022 study surveying families who conceived through embryo donation found that children demonstrated normal psychosocial adjustment and that parents reported strong parent-child attachment and acceptance. Waters was clear that this stands in sharp contrast to standard fertility clinics, where embryos are still bought and sold as property, with no such protections required.
American policy should affirm that a frozen embryo is a human life deserving legal protection; establish enforceable federal standards for how embryos are stored, retrieved, and thawed to ensure embryos are not left in permanent storage or treated as disposable; strengthen informed consent so patients understand, before treatment begins, what could happen to their embryos; prioritize funding for embryo adoption as the preferred path forward for embryos already in storage; and incentivize restorative reproductive medicine that treats the causes of infertility rather than bypassing them.
Protecting embryos and expanding fertility care can, and should, advance together. Real compassion for families pursuing parenthood must include compassion for the embryos already created in that pursuit.
The sanctity of life and defense of the family are not competing convictions, but principles that should be held together, honoring both the family being formed and the smallest lives brought into this world.
Let us seek to protect children, women, and families at every stage of life.
Sarai McCullough, Government Affairs/Public Policy Intern at Concerned Women for America