A religiously inspired fertility approach is gaining traction just as Trump abandons his campaign promise to expand in vitro fertilization access.
When Donald Trump anointed himself the “father of IVF” on the campaign trail, he promised to expand insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization—a move that was more pronatalist than pro-choice. In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order to explore reducing insurance-plan and out-of-pocket costs for IVF without a national insurance mandate. Now, reports indicate that the “father of IVF” is walking back his campaign promise just as a religiously motivated “alternative” threatens to enter mainstream medicine and be codified into law.
“Restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM) is currently being billed as the “ethical” alternative to IVF. However, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine warns that RRM “repackages” standard fertility care to mask an ideological agenda. As RRM gains political traction, doctors worry it will further discredit evidence-based fertility medicine and limit reproductive care for patients.
Proponents of RRM reject fertility methods that involve handling eggs, embryos or sperm outside the body, and many also discourage hormonal contraception. Instead, RRM encompasses treatments and procedures like ultrasounds, blood testing, diagnostic imaging and hormonal therapy—fertility care already practiced by qualified physicians.
RRM is an extension of Catholic bioethics that developed in opposition during the advent of both modern contraception and assisted reproductive technologies. In 2013, Catholic doctors introduced “natural procreative technology” (often called NaProTECHNOLOGY) to a wider medical audience via the American Medical Association’s Virtual Mentor bulletin. NaProTECHNOLOGY and the Creighton Model FertilityCare System—a fertility awareness method for tracking and interpreting menstrual cycles based on the Billings Ovulation Method—form the basis of what these doctors called “conscientious medicine,” or methods that purport to treat infertility as a symptom rather than a disease. Both the Creighton model and NaProTECHNOLOGY were pioneered at Minnesota’s Pope Paul VI Institute, a Catholic research center founded in 1985 to build a “culture of life in women’s health.”
Currently, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops only approves fertility and family planning methods that don’t act as a “barrier” between married couples. That includes methods like NaProTECHNOLOGY and fertility awareness methods such as natural family planning. Natural family planning is often considered a “morally acceptable” form of contraception, but the Catholic Church claims it isn’t “contraceptive” in nature.
The Catholic Church’s opposition to assisted reproductive technologies and contraception is two-fold:
- The Church considers the direct destruction of a human embryo to be equivalent to killing.
- Contraception and any technologies that work outside of sex or add a “third party” are seen as violations of the conjugal act between married couples.
Aside from the U.S. Catholic bishops, some of RRM’s most prominent backers include the Catholic Medical Association, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Heritage Foundation—organizations with either explicit Catholic affiliations or close links to right-wing movements that seek to inject their narrow morality into American public life. The Ethics & Public Policy Center, for example, is the right-wing think tank behind a recent mifepristone study widely criticized for its “shoddy science.” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and FDA director Marty Makary are using this study to push for renewed investigations into mifepristone.
A similar dynamic appears to be unfolding with RRM. The Catholic Medical Association—a prominent member of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the medical coalition that filed the initial lawsuit in 2022 targeting mifepristone and the FDA—urged the Trump administration earlier this year to reconsider its position on IVF. The organization positioned RRM as more “medically sound” and more successful than IVF, and reiterated that RRM saves countless “lives” of frozen embryos.
Dr. Tim Millea, chairman of CMA’s Health Care Policy Committee, added in a statement: “If one correctly recognizes that life begins at conception, and that every human life deserves respect and the right to live, then interventions such as IVF are unacceptable.”
The Catholic Medical Association’s current position wields familiar anti-abortion-inspired language around IVF, taken from the 1987 Vatican document Donum Vitae, an instruction on biomedical research addressed to both married couples and medical professionals. Here, the Vatican explicitly declared that “embryos obtained in vitro are human beings and subjects with rights” and connected assisted reproductive technologies to church doctrine on what it considers “direct” abortion. “Just as the Church condemns induced abortion, so she also forbids acts against the life of these human beings,” Donum Vitae stated.
Yet other RRM proponents are deploying more feminist-coded language. In a recent editorial published in The Federalist, a group of doctors presents RRM as “pro-woman” and “patient-centered” medicine. RRM, these doctors claim, steps in for women when the existing healthcare system has failed them.
What’s not mentioned in this editorial is that two of the doctors trained as fellows at the Paul VI Institute—the (Catholic) home of NaProTECHNOLOGY and the Creighton model. But even the U.S.C.C.B. has begun to move away from overtly anti-choice or morality-driven language in its own educational materials. The U.S.C.C.B. now uses the term “restorative reproductive medicine,” lumping RRM and natural family planning (the Catholic term for the fertility awareness method) under “Ethical Woman’s Reproductive Healthcare.”
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation—the group behind Project 2025—published a report this spring deeming RRM the “new frontier” of holistic reproductive medicine. “Rather than suppressing or circumventing distressing symptoms of reproductive health conditions with pharmaceutical Band-Aids or ART,” the report states, “RRM treats the conditions and seeks to return the individual to peak health.”
Except this isn’t a “new frontier” at all. The Rev. Albert Moraczewski, O.P., uttered the Heritage Foundation’s words almost verbatim at the 1979 meeting of the National Catholic Physicians’ Guilds: “Unlike most medical procedures which seek to restore natural functioning, IVF bypasses an important segment of the process.”
What we’re seeing now isn’t feminist and equity-driven reproductive health policy. Rather, it’s a decades-long campaign to align mainstream reproductive medicine with Catholic bioethics, increasingly embraced—and institutionalized—by right-wing Christian groups.
It should come as no surprise that the Heritage Foundation helped shape Arkansas’ newly passed Reproductive Empowerment and Support Through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE) Act, the first law in the nation to enshrine RRM as a distinct evidence-based fertility treatment. Although the law doesn’t ban IVF, it sneakily separates RRM from assisted reproductive technologies and positions RRM as a way to bridge the gap in medical research and empower patients “to assess, understand, and improve their reproductive health.”
The RESTORE Act mandates insurance coverage for RRM in addition to IVF. It also requires the fertility awareness method to be included under family planning services at all Title X-funded medical facilities throughout the state.
Not all fertility doctors in Arkansas welcomed this law. The Arkansas Fertility and Gynecology clinic in Little Rock currently broadcasts this warning on its homepage: “‘Restorative Reproductive Medicine’ (RRM), recently promoted in Arkansas, is not a medically proven alternative to IVF.”
Dr. Dean Moutos of Arkansas Fertility and Gynecology told the Arkansas Advocate in June: “If you read between the lines, [Act 859] is a backhanded attack on assisted reproductive technology in my view, not because of what they say, but because of what they clearly omit.”
That is, the RESTORE Act excludes IVF from its discussion of fertility treatments—a choice that, both Moutos and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine argue, reinforces these long-held narratives that IVF doctors “bypass” other fertility options.
Restorative reproductive medicine’ (RRM) is currently being billed as the ‘ethical’ alternative to IVF. However, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine warns that RRM ‘repackages’ standard fertility care to mask an ideological agenda.
Promoting RRM as an alternative to IVF is also another way the state institutionalizes heteronormativity, which ensures that heterosexual marriage or monogamy is the only legitimate path to parenthood. Whether in Catholic or secular contexts, RRM is marketed primarily to heterosexual couples, further stigmatizing single people, transgender people and queer couples.
This likely isn’t an accident. As early as the 1920s, American Catholic doctors, bishops and priests expressed concerns about the rising birth control movement and declining birth rate. Once some American Protestant and Jewish denominations, as well as the American Medical Association, liberalized their positions on contraception in the 1930s, Catholic doctors and clergy doubled down on their anti-contraception position.
In 1937, the Rev. Ignatius Cox, S.J., an ethicist and member of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds (the predecessor to the Catholic Medical Association), published a scathing indictment of “the sexual lie” of contraception and the corrupted mainstream medical establishment. “The action of the American Medical Association came about, in reality, as the result of our modern egoistic and materialistic world-view,” Cox wrote in American Medicine, American Morals and Birth Control. “There are greater things than health and pleasure: honor, for instance, or self sacrifice.”
Catholic anxieties over the perceived moral decline of American society continued well into the 1940s and ’50s, even as attitudes toward birth control evolved. A groundbreaking survey conducted by Dr. Alan Guttmacher found that an overwhelming majority of the 15,000 medical practitioners polled favored contraception for health and economic reasons.
After Guttmacher presented his findings at a Planned Parenthood meeting in 1947, which sought to use the results for advocacy purposes, Baltimore Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley convened the forum “The Ethical Aspects of the Planned Parenthood Movement.” Curley directly countered Guttmacher and Planned Parenthood to the press: Catholic medicine already had research-backed birth control, one that was “accomplished without the use of contraceptives” and “effected by self-restraint.”
By the time the world witnessed its first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978, Catholic physicians, ethicists and clergy were already mobilizing to condemn assisted reproductive technologies. Their main concern: Can a married couple morally use IVF to conceive?
The answer, of course, was no. But Catholic doctors didn’t only discredit the science behind IVF. When addressing Catholic Physicians in 1979, Moraczewski linked IVF to those earlier fears over America’s supposed immorality: non-procreative sex, low birth rates and relationships outside marriage.
… a decades-long campaign to align mainstream reproductive medicine with Catholic bioethics, increasingly embraced—and institutionalized—by right-wing Christian groups.
“The Church’s concern has been to preserve the stability of marriage,” Moraczewski said, “and this particular technology [IVF] seems ultimately to be destructive of that stability because it weakens the marriage bond.”
Prioritizing RRM over comprehensive fertility medicine only fuels this same moral panic—over America’s declining birth rates, record numbers of single women, and growing queer and gender-nonconforming families. While RRM offers some benefits, in this effort to “make America fertile again,” it’s only the conservative agenda that stands to gain.
Great Job Lauren Barbato & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
