Query:

I’ve been thinking of the ethics of voting for the lesser evil.  The Trump/Vance campaign wants to mandate free IVF coverage.  The National Catholic Register points out that that more embryos are destroyed each year by way of IVF than by way of abortion.  In a post-Christian, Hobbesian society, this seems like a sure-fire way to turn the children who survive IVF into commodities.  Can voting for candidates who actively seek to degrade the meaning of sex in this sort of way be justified as a lesser evil, compared to the overt celebration of abortion on the Harris/Walz side of things?

Reply:

To paraphrase Joseph de Maistre, a nation gets the candidates that it deserves – and this is now happening with a vengeance.  You may be interested in this October 2020 post, which works through the logic of choosing lesser evils.  But to respond just to your three points:

You’re right that myriads of unwanted embryos are discarded after IVF.  Even so, it is possible to perform IVF without killing any of them – in fact some activists propose reforms such as requiring practitioners not to fertilize so many ova in the first place.  By contrast, abortion just is killing.  Killing and abortion cannot be separated.

You’re right that the intention in IVF is perverse.  But although it is a grave moral injury to the child to be conceived outside the loving embrace of his parents, it is nothing like killing him.  Most people who ask for IVF do so because they want to have a child (and for some reason refuse to consider adoption).  But in abortion, the aim is the child’s destruction.

Finally, you’re right about turning children into commodities, because IVF converts procreation into something more like factory production.  But at least in IVF the little human “products” are allowed to live, and perhaps even cherished.  I can’t think of a more drastic and terrible way to turn babies into commodities than to sell their shredded tissue, which is more and more what abortion is about these days.

Besides, it isn’t as though the Harris/Walz team doesn’t believe in IVF.  And let’s not forget that although they and their media flacks say it isn’t true, they aggressively and “joyfully” promote not only every sort of abortion at every stage, but even the killing of babies already born.  Last year, for example, Governor Walz signed a bill which removed previous statutory language in requiring medical personnel to “preserve the life and health” of babies born alive, replacing it with language requiring them merely to “care” for them.  This means that although you don’t have to do a damn thing to keep the babies alive, you should keep them “comfortable” as they gasp out their last breaths.  Yes, this is the standard of medical practice, not only in Minnesota but in a number of other states too.  And yes, this is actually being done.

So for me, the particular choice of lesser and greater evils before us does not seem difficult -- just painful.  Promoting IVF isn’t remotely comparable to cheerleading for abortion and infanticide.

The danger for the future is very great, and I agree with Edward Feser that anyone who does recognize the Trump/Vance ticket as the lesser evil must also vigorously protest the Republican Party’s betrayal of its former commitments.  His suggestions about how to pull off such a balancing act deserve close consideration.