Lightly Regulated In Vitro Fertilization Yields Thousands of Babies Annually

If in vitro fertilization still seems to be cutting-edge medicine, you haven’t been paying attention.

The first infant born in the United States as a result of in vitro fertilization entered the world in 1981. In 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 65,000 U.S. births resulted from assisted reproduction technology. (ART generally refers to fertility treatments in which either eggs or embryos are handled, but it does not include artificial insemination, which experts believe results in far more births than ART does.) The CDC also reports that about 12 percent of women of childbearing age have used infertility services and that 1.5 percent of all American infants are conceived using ART.

So, assisted reproduction is nothing new. And yet regarding regulatory matters, both the federal government and the states have given the multi-billion-dollar industry a wide berth, which makes this country very much an outlier compared with the rest of the developed world. (One exception to minimal federal intervention: President George W. Bush’s ban in 2001 on the use of newly...