In the United States, attitudes toward infertility treatment vary by religiosity, with differing beliefs shaping distinct principles and objectives. This reflects an ideologically driven society that often seeks to align medical practices with its values.
Currently, these boundaries encompass fertility treatments that align with the culture’s emphasis on abortion and contraception. President Donald Trump’s diverse policy approaches are testing these limits. Tensions emerge where the administration’s clear support for in vitro fertilization intersects with its interest in restorative reproductive medicine.
IVF is a widely accepted, largely unregulated mainstay in fertility treatment, often serving as a superficial fix for infertility while advancing the sexual freedom agenda. It poses risks to embryos and marriages and falls short as a comprehensive solution. Despite this, Trump is dedicated to “expanding access” to IVF. This stance clashes with perspectives from another group of administration advisors tied to the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, which focuses on addressing the root causes of infertility. Known as “restorative reproductive medicine,” this approach, often linked to socially conservative Christian values, prioritizes holistic solutions over reactive measures.
Correct though they are, these associations of RRM with pro-life approaches illumine the immediate mainstream attempts to discredit it. What we hear from official voices, such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is that, when RRM recommends treatments such as cycle tracking, hormone screening, and precise diagnoses, it “appears to be a political rather than a scientific concept.” Likewise some doctors argue about RRM that “These ideologies have been around for a long time, and they’re always rooted in religion,” as quoted by the New York Times, “It’s not actual medicine.” Still other commentators relegate it to “religious fundamentalists.”
Once, medicine may have been described straightforwardly as a three-step of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. The modification of the term, which we see with default resistance to RRM, is what is happening in public discourse. They admit, and are committed to the bit, that “there is no true alternative to IVF.” And so, unfortunately, it was always going to happen this way.
Of course, pro-lifers feel a similar instinctive wariness at the sound of “reproductive health” and “women’s rights” (or any combination of those four words). It is justified by the political schema, but also unfortunate.
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Yet the very existence of “restorative reproductive medicine” signals an openness to the concept as it is, without ideological layering. Not so for the pro-abortion side, which seems to indicate that it will always be skeptical of pro-life-adjacent proposals. Indeed, they prove that they will be more than skeptical when they reject RRM automatically, with absurd claims that it is pseudoscience.
That leaves the rest to obvious political warfare: Social liberalism would suffer greatly from the implications that would come from dialing back IVF use. And dialing back IVF use only brings us to its predecessor, natural RRM methods. So, in the spirit of unity, if RRM is not “actual science,” what does that leave IVF?