A new approach to fertility care

Sen. Katie Britt’s recent essay in The Hill, “A Hidden Barrier to Starting a Family,” puts a name and a face to a crisis the fertility debate has been slow to absorb: endometriosis. Britt writes about a young woman named Emily who spent years in debilitating pain, underwent multiple failed surgeries as a teenager, and was never properly diagnosed—a story, Britt argues, that is not unique. The lesson is one with real implications for how we approach reproductive health. If we want to protect life and strengthen families, we must understand and treat the diseases that damage women’s fertility long before a couple ever seeks a specialist.

This is the opening that the public comment period for the Trump Administration's proposed fertility benefit has given us, and Christians should not waste it.

The proposal arrives at an unexpected moment of realignment between social conservatives and aspects of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. For many years, “reproductive healthcare” served as a euphemism for abortion, birth control, and IVF, and the pro-life movement rightly kept its distance, focusing instead on pregnancy care centers, advocacy on behalf of the unborn, and financial support for moms. But there is a new opportunity on the table to promote true root cause care for underlying reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis and male-factor infertility.

Consider what women are typically offered today. When a pregnancy is dangerous, unplanned, or financially overwhelming, abortion is presented as the solution. When cycles are painful or irregular—often early signs of endometriosis or other hormonal conditions—the answer is the birth control pill, which masks symptoms without treating, reversing, or even slowing the progression of the underlying disease. And when a woman struggles to conceive, she is directed toward IVF, a procedure that bypasses the body entirely to create, discard, and freeze human embryos, while leaving the root causes of infertility untouched in both partners.

Endometriosis is a stark illustration of exactly this failure. It affects one in ten women in the United States, takes an average of ten years to diagnose, and is one of the most common underlying causes of infertility. Women with the disease are up to four times as likely to struggle to conceive, and among infertile women, as many as 25 to 50 percent have endometriosis. The longer a woman goes without proper care and is instead told to suppress her symptoms with birth control or bypass her body with IVF, the worse the condition grows.

When President Trump released the IVF executive order in February 2025, the response was mixed: MAHA advocates, social conservatives, and pro-lifers raised concerns about the surplus of human embryos created, destroyed, and indefinitely frozen in the IVF process, and pointed out that IVF is not a treatment for infertility at all. It may result in the creation of human embryos, but it does nothing to treat the underlying reproductive health conditions that cause infertility, improve egg and sperm quality, or decrease miscarriage rates.

That pushback mattered. The administration’s September 2025 IVF report declined to mandate IVF coverage, instead creating an optional, fully customizable fertility benefit that employers could use solely to promote restorative reproductive medicine (RRM).

RRM combines cycle tracking, targeted lab testing, lifestyle interventions, medical and hormonal therapies, and corrective surgeries to restore natural fertility in both men and women. Specialties such as Natural Procreative Technology, Creighton FertilityCare, FEMM, and NeoFertility offer something conventional reproductive medicine has not: an approach that optimizes the body rather than suppressing or bypassing it.

The results are striking. Among couples who had already experienced an average of two failed IVF cycles, one study found a 32 percent live birth rate; other studies reported between 41 and 52.8 percent success rates treating infertility. Indeed, a March 2026 survey cited in the Department of Labor’s own rulemaking found that 89 percent of women preferred a less invasive, evidence-supported fertility treatment before trying IVF.

This brings us to the Federal Register, and to a concrete action Christians can take right now.

The proposed rule establishes a new category of “limited excepted benefits” for fertility care, allowing employers to offer standalone fertility coverage outside of major medical plans. Public comments are due by July 13, at regulations.gov, docket number 2026-09479.

Rather than just rejecting this benefit because some will use it to promote IVF, Christians should engage the comment period to shape the rule toward life-affirming care. Comments should urge that the rule’s language—covering “diagnosis, mitigation, or treatment of infertility or related reproductive health conditions”—explicitly encompass endometriosis diagnosis and excision surgery, cycle-based diagnostics, hormonal workups for both partners, and broader RRM care. They should also affirm the rule’s voluntary structure, ensuring that Christian employers can offer restorative medicine without being required to fund IVF.

As Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “great love springs from a great knowledge of the beloved object.” That is the animating idea behind restorative reproductive medicine: knowing the body well enough to heal it, rather than suppressing or bypassing it.

Women shouldn’t have to wait nearly a decade for answers about their health, and their fertility shouldn’t be harmed by a lack of education and institutional inaction. The pro-life movement has long understood this instinctively, even when the language and the policy vehicles weren’t available to act on it. Now they are. The fertility benefit rule, Sen. Britt’s advocacy on care for endometriosis, and the open comment period are a rare convergence of political will and policy opportunity.