2025: A Mixed Bag for Human Dignity

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The President enthusiastically promoted in vitro fertilization during his campaign and early in his second term. However, the administration’s policy, unveiled in late October, was rightly described by Ryan Anderson, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as “perhaps the least bad that we could have hoped for.” He then added, “[B]ut least bad is still bad.”

In a follow-up to an earlier executive order, the President announced a plan to dramatically reduce the cost of IVF, provide insurance coverage for fertility treatments including IVF, and increase access to IVF. According to the President, “You can’t get more pro-life than this.”

But IVF is not pro-life. In fact, it is not even pro-fertility. While born children do result from IVF, the way it is most often practiced results in far more lives being lost than those that survive. As Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins posted on X in response to the announcement: “The IVF Industry kills more preborn babies than the abortion industry, doesn’t cure infertility, and practices eugenics.”

Also in October, in the wee hours of Halloween morning, the Illinois State Senate passed a bill to legalize assisted suicide, adding the lethal practice to an unrelated measure on food sanitation. Because the Illinois House had already passed SB 1950, the bill now sits on the desk of Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has until January to sign or veto the legislation. If signed into law, patients with six months or less to live would be granted access to life-ending medicine, if determined by a physician and a mental health professional to be “of sound mind” after a series of oral and written requests with witnesses attesting.

Doctors would also be required to explain other end-of-life care options such as hospice. If prescribed a life-ending drug, patients would administer it themselves. Health care providers would not be required to participate.

Assisted suicide is the best example of a cultural slippery slope there is. Any “safeguards” inevitably fail, and patients are always left susceptible to cultural and financial pressures. For example, in 2016, Colorado voters approved the End-of-life Options Act. Last year, the governor signed legislation to also allow some registered nurses to prescribe the lethal drugs and to reduce the waiting period from 15 to seven days. A pending lawsuit would eliminate other restrictions, such as preventing out-of-state residents from receiving drugs for assisted suicide. If this lawsuit is successful, Colorado would become a “suicide tourism” destination, allowing individuals anywhere in the United States to “shop for death.” Colorado doctors already prescribe lethal doses to patients with severe eating disorders. 

The major bright spot on the life front in 2025 came from the Supreme Court, which ruled that states can defund Planned Parenthood. As a result, more than 20 states now exclude abortion groups from Medicaid dollars.

Three cases with implications for life are currently on the High Court docket, including allowing states to require its doctors to tell women that chemical abortion can be reversed. They will also consider the forced coverage of elective abortions in insurance plans. Perhaps the most significant case is First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin, which will address whether crisis-pregnancy centers can fight state harassment, specifically in how they advertise their services.

Even as the Court has taken steps to defend its most vulnerable citizens, the wider American culture continues to embrace and advance a dangerous view about human dignity and value. This view, centered around false notions of autonomy and sexual freedom, has left the most vulnerable among us even more so.

Thus, even as we applaud any laws that protect vulnerable lives, we must also pray for God to intervene on their behalf. But we also must act. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said, “In a hundred years, if Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we will have been doing something right.”

In short, Christians must love and serve those who are the most vulnerable among us. We must seek to persuade as many as we can that every person is made in the image and likeness of God. We must live differently than the world around us.

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Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Mladen Zivkovic

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.