A strand of Leftist reasoning wants to decrease the use of in vitro fertilization. Not, of course, because it is wrong, but because it is unfair.
In an Atlantic article arguing that “Men Might Be the Key to an American Baby Boom,” the unfairness heads in two directions. For one, men don’t receive the health focus they deserve, especially regarding infertility testing and treatment. Preceding and amplifying that circumstance is the problem with which the author is much more concerned: that women “disproportionately bear the medical and emotional demands of fertility treatment.”
IVF is a painful and long process, and one made more frequent than it needs to be, simply because the majority of infertility resources are poured into the women’s side of things. “If coverage expands for IVF but not for other fertility treatments,” the author writes, “more patients will be routed toward it, even when less invasive or more targeted options might work just as well.”
Among those other, more natural options, restorative reproductive medicine, or RRM, is the most prominent. Perhaps because it makes the most sense, and yet is the most threatening to all the relevant “Bigs” (fertility, abortion, sexual freedom), the article pivots clear away from any support for RRM. In fact, it decently attacks the framework.
As a method that searches for “root causes of infertility” and prioritizes holistic health, RRM rejects such things as the birth control pill and IVF. It is popular among social conservatives, especially Catholics, but on its own, it is straightforward habit management and biomarking.
At the same time, however, RRM deals with the woman’s role in the conception process, in everything from cycle tracking to diet and hormone monitoring. That one aspect serves as a primary example for the author’s thesis. And so, despite RRM’s otherwise stellar record, it is also a primary target for what the author sees as an oddly male-exclusionary field of research. “The Heritage Foundation has vigorously advocated for RRM,” she wrote, “yet its policy papers and lobbying efforts do not prioritize male-specific treatments.”
If a valid complaint, the woman-centric reproductive field is no coincidence. Its usual proponents have steered it in that direction. Leftist politics sway radically against marriage, in favor of women’s independence and homosexuality, and against men, generally. The senses of honor and of spousal unity that once defined marriage have been degraded to misery and, if not tolerable misery, divorce. As a result of pushing men out of the realm, the “meticulous cycle tracking” which RRM requires of women is more of an unjust burden than anything else.
At that, women’s life-bearing capacities have been reduced to merely human, and equally burdensome, dimensions. The cycle tracking mentioned earlier is tedious and annoying, but mostly when it regards pregnancy as something entirely controllable and discardable. Abortion, along with advanced reproductive technologies such as IVF and genome editing, has made it so. With abortion in particular at the helm of the Democratic Party, men’s opinions are said not to matter, and women’s to matter exclusively.
Still, the author makes sure to clarify that “IVF will remain irreplaceable for some families,” including those with “genetic anomalies” and “LGBTQ couples.” If the argument seemed noble at the start, it ends morally vacuous.
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But the whole time, it also doubles down on the premise that pushed men to the fringes of reproductive concern in the first place: That fairness for women overtakes any other consideration.
If anything, then, the idea that men’s infertility is the answer to women’s stress levels is another justice mechanism, one veiled as a response to Democratic failings with men. It is no actual endeavor on behalf of human life.