Johnson won’t say if destruction of embryos during IVF process is murder

House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to say whether the destruction of unused embryos — part of the in vitro fertilization process — was murder on Thursday.

“It’s something that we’ve got to grapple with,” he said in an interview with “CBS Mornings” on Thursday. “It’s a brave new world. IVF’s only been invented I think in the early 70s … we support the sanctity of life, of course, and we support IVF and full access to it.”

When he was asked to clarify his thoughts, he called on policymakers to look more closely at the issue to determine how best to handle unused embryos created via IVF.

Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos were children, prompting fertility clinics in the state to pause IVF procedures and kicking off a national backlash. The state’s governor signed a law to protect the procedure earlier this week.

Although Johnson has previously said he supports IVF, he said Congress would not take up the issue.

“If you do believe that life begins at conception, it’s a really important question to wrestle with,” he said. “It’s not one Congress has dealt with. It won’t be. I think it’s a states’ issue and states will have to be handling that.”

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