The pro-life concerns about in-vitro fertilization are manifold, but this might be a new one: For parents with a specific family size in mind, it could lead to successful pregnancies followed by a natural pregnancy that ends with abortion. A Democratic candidate for Congress confessed on a podcast this month that she had an abortion after planning her perfect family size with IVF.

Esther Kim Varet, who’s running to represent California’s 40th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, talked about abortion on “The Happily Never After” podcast for nearly 45 minutes. She told the host that she had abortions at 21 and 41 and she chose to have the second abortion because she had already achieved her ideal family size of two kids, one boy and one girl.

“We have a plan,” she said to justify her decision.

The plan, she explained, was that Varet didn’t want to have any more children because of the environment.

“We’re big environmentalists,” she said of herself and her husband. “For us, philosophically, we don’t want to overburden our footprint, like, on the world. And we’re not the kind of people that are like, ‘I just want a lot of children and I don’t know how to explain it.’ Like, I know exactly why we just wanted two. We wanted just to replace ourselves and not overburden anybody else or the world that we leave them with.”

Morality aside, none of this makes practical sense. Having two children is still just below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, and, if anything, America needs bigger families to make up for our current replacement rate of 1.6. Not to mention that creating more human life means more human ingenuity and creativity to solve environmental problems.

Even if these things weren’t true, it obviously wouldn’t justify abortion. What’s really disturbing here, though, is to hear an aspiring leader speak so casually and definitively about her approach to family “planning.” It fits in with a broader approach to normalizing abortion. No longer should it be safe, legal, and rare; now it should be available for any reason at all, even if you’ve simply met your target family size and don’t want any more kids. Even better if you can appeal to the environment to justify your decision.

Varet also noted that she still has five embryos on ice after going through IVF. She said embryos are not “disposable” but justified the excess embryos by saying that’s the way IVF works; after achieving the pregnancies they want, many parents have embryos left over.

She’s right that she’s not unique in this situation, but that doesn’t make the problem of frozen embryos any less disturbing. There are a million frozen embryos in the U.S. today, just waiting to be carried to term. Most of them probably won’t be.

A culture that is cavalier about human life will be dismissive about elective abortion and hundreds of thousands of embryos waiting to see the light of day. None of these things are normal, or healthy, or good. And we shouldn’t let politicians off the hook for talking about human life as if a parent’s preferences supersede the lives of her unborn children.