The Battle Over TRICARE Reveals Whether Pro-Lifers Truly Believe Life Starts at Conception
By Jeff Bayard, Virginia Christian Alliance
A quiet battle is unfolding in Washington that will test whether the pro-life movement truly means what it says about when life begins. Speaker Mike Johnson stands nearly alone against bipartisan pressure to expand in vitro fertilization (IVF) coverage in military healthcare—and the outcome will reveal whether Christians are willing to defend the unborn even when it’s politically inconvenient.
Dr. Albert Mohler, in a recent episode of The Briefing, brought this critical issue to light, noting that “sometimes there are issues with really big worldview significance that don’t get a lot of national attention, and they should.” This is precisely one of those moments. What’s happening with TRICARE military healthcare demands the attention of every Christian who claims to believe that life begins at conception.
The TRICARE Controversy: More Than Meets the Eye
The debate centers on TRICARE, the healthcare program covering millions of U.S. military personnel and their families. Representatives Sarah Jacobs and Senator Tammy Duckworth are pushing for blanket IVF coverage with no restrictions—a move Speaker Johnson courageously blocked last year and is fighting again now. But this isn’t simply about healthcare benefits. It’s about whether we will subsidize the creation and destruction of human life with taxpayer dollars.
Under the Biden administration’s March 2024 expansion, TRICARE already opened IVF eligibility to unmarried service members and those requiring donated eggs or sperm. The proposed expansion would go further still, removing virtually all restrictions and creating a system where anyone—married or single, heterosexual or same-sex couples, even individual service members wanting a child alone—could access IVF at taxpayer expense.
The cost would be astronomical. But the moral cost is infinitely higher.
The Inconvenient Truth About IVF
Here’s what many Christians don’t understand: the standard IVF procedure creates multiple embryos in a laboratory. Doctors screen these embryos for “quality,” selecting some for implantation while discarding or freezing the rest. This isn’t hypothetical—it’s routine practice.
Each embryo is a human life. If we believe life begins at fertilization—not at implantation, heartbeat, or viability—then IVF as commonly practiced involves destroying human beings created in God’s image.
Psalm 139:13-14 declares, “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” God’s creative work begins at conception. The womb is His “personal art studio,” where He designs every human being with intention and purpose.
The Sanctity of Life Meets Biblical Sexuality
The IVF debate exposes the intersection of two foundational Christian principles: the sanctity of human life and God’s design for sexuality and procreation. Both are under assault in this proposal.
First, the sanctity of life. Genesis 1:27 tells us that God created mankind in His own image. This isn’t merely about physical resemblance—it’s about intrinsic value. Every human being, from the moment of conception, bears the imago Dei. When we create human embryos only to discard those deemed imperfect or unnecessary, we play God with devastating consequences. We declare that some lives are worth preserving while others are expendable raw material for achieving our desires.
Second, God’s design for procreation. From the beginning, God established that children should come from the marital union of husband and wife. Genesis 2:24 describes marriage: “A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” The next chapter immediately follows with Eve conceiving and bearing children. This is not coincidental—it’s God’s design.
IVF fundamentally separates procreation from the conjugal act of marriage. It takes the creation of life out of the intimate union God designed and places it in a laboratory. And the proposed TRICARE expansion goes even further, extending this technology to unmarried individuals and same-sex couples, completely severing the connection between marriage, sexual union, and the creation of children.
Three Moral Collapses in One Policy
As Dr. Al Mohler recently explained on The Briefing, this expansion represents multiple levels of moral collapse occurring simultaneously. Mohler warns that “we’re looking at multiple levels of moral collapse. It’s a subversion of marriage, it’s a subversion of sexual morality and it’s a subversion of the sanctity of human life.”
First, it subverts marriage. By making IVF available to anyone regardless of marital status, we communicate that children need not come from a married mother and father. We pretend that a child’s need for both a mom and a dad is negotiable, subordinate to adult desires.
Second, it subverts sexual morality. God designed sexual intimacy for marriage and linked it inherently to procreation. IVF divorces these two realities, suggesting that we can separate sex from babies and babies from sex according to our preferences rather than God’s design.
Third, it subverts the sanctity of human life. By creating human embryos as commodities to be screened, selected, and discarded, we reduce children from gifts from God to products of technology—evaluated for quality and disposed of when they don’t meet our standards.
Why This Matters Beyond the Military
This isn’t just about military healthcare. Federal policy sets standards that spread elsewhere. If taxpayers must fund unrestricted IVF, that principle will expand. If we accept IVF for anyone wanting a child—regardless of marital status or medical necessity—we normalize routinely destroying human life.
This also tests whether pro-life Christians maintain consistent convictions. It’s easy to oppose abortion when the issue clearly involves taking a life. It’s harder when destruction happens in a laboratory, wrapped in sympathetic narratives of couples desperate for children. But consistency demands protecting human life from its earliest moments, even when created outside the womb.
Standing with Speaker Johnson
Speaker Mike Johnson faces enormous pressure from both parties, his own caucus, and potentially the White House. President Trump has expressed support for making IVF widely available—a heartfelt concern that overlooks the moral catastrophe of how IVF operates.
Al Mohler rightly observes that Speaker Johnson “is already in a very difficult position, just because of the small margin that Republicans have in the House and all kinds of political pressures from within the Republicans themselves.” Yet Johnson continues to stand firm. Mohler adds that “those on the other side are going at him full bore,” attempting to pressure both the Republican Party and the White House into forcing the speaker to back down.
Johnson understands what’s at stake. Once blanket IVF coverage is offered, there’s no logical stopping point. Marriage becomes irrelevant. Embryonic destruction becomes routine. And Christians become complicit through tax dollars in practices violating the sanctity of life they claim to uphold.
The Path Forward
Christians must do three things immediately:
First, contact your representatives. Tell them you oppose expanding IVF coverage in TRICARE. Make clear that you support Speaker Johnson’s position and that this issue matters to you as a voter.
Second, educate your church and community. Most Christians don’t understand how IVF works or why it poses such profound moral problems. Share this information. Start conversations. Don’t let this issue disappear in the year-end legislative chaos.
Third, examine your own consistency. Do you truly believe life begins at conception? If so, are you willing to stand by that conviction even when it’s inconvenient or when it means telling well-meaning couples that the path they’ve chosen involves the destruction of human life?
The Stakes Could Not Be Higher
Proverbs 31:8-9 commands us: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”
Embryonic human beings cannot speak for themselves. They cannot defend their right to life. They cannot protest their classification as excess or defective. That means we must speak for them. We must defend them. We must not allow their destruction to become normalized through government policy.
This is one of those moments when the pro-life movement will either stand firm on its foundational principles or reveal that those principles were negotiable all along. When we say life begins at conception, we cannot mean “except for embryos created through IVF.” When we say every human life has dignity and value, we cannot mean “except for those deemed surplus to reproductive needs.”
The culture is moving away from us on this issue. The political pressure is intense. The path of least resistance would be to stay silent or to compromise. But that’s precisely why we must speak now—because silence is surrender, and surrender is unthinkable when human lives hang in the balance.
Speaker Johnson is standing. Will we stand with him?
The Virginia Christian Alliance promotes biblical values in today’s world, including the sanctity of human life from conception and God’s design for marriage and sexuality. We call Christians to engage these critical issues with biblical conviction and courage. Learn more at vachristian.org.
