MAHA Starts With Addressing Root Causes Of Infertility

One of the biggest selling points of the Make America Healthy Again movement and the Trump administration’s adoption of it is ensuring the U.S. healthcare system “promotes health rather than just managing disease.” Yet, when it comes to infertility, a disease that affects one in seven couples trying to conceive, both the White House and MAHA champion Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are fixated on management over prevention and investigation.

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order vowing to preserve a subset of that industry’s ever-growing stream of in vitro fertilization (IVF) customers, Kennedy celebrated it as “an important strategy for addressing the national crisis on plummeting fertility rates.”

He also complained about the “high costs” associated with the procedure but failed to call out the most obvious cause for them: Big Pharma

The corporate pharmaceutical industry plays a significant role in the prevalence of IVF. Various expensive fertility drugs are prescribed to hopeful couples to stimulate egg development, trigger or delay ovulation, prepare a woman’s endocrine system and womb lining for embryo transfer, and keep certain pregnancy hormones such as progesterone elevated after embryo transfers.

The shots a woman gets during each IVF cycle are so numerous that posing babies with the empty jab applicators that contributed to their creation has become a popular photo trend among people who use assisted reproductive technology (ART).

In addition to his shortsightedness regarding the monetary costs of IVF, Kennedy also failed to count the social and physical costs of reproductive technology — even though he is likely aware of them. Kennedy’s vice presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, made headlines during his 2024 run for warning against the ubiquity of IVF and calling it “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”

Big Fertility, whose biggest seller is IVF, routinely prioritizes profit over people. The industry offers anyone and everyone, regardless of their relationship status or sexuality, to buy reproduction without regard for children’s natural rights. The consequences include normalized eugenics, forced orphanhood, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, more than a million indefinitely frozen embryos, and deliberate ignorance of women’s health solutions.

While it’s important for Kennedy to execute the will of the president, as he promised to do with the pro-life protections that defined Trump’s first term, it’s also important for him to stick to the MAHA script that put him in the running for head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the first place.

Researching and adopting fertility policies that address the root causes of infertility instead of treating its symptoms with a lengthy and costly technological procedure that guarantees nothing but the serial creation and destruction of little lives is undoubtedly on par with the MAHA mission.

Restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), as opposed to ART like IVF, gives allegedly infertile couples a chance to understand and treat why they have difficulty conceiving instead of jumping to circumvent natural reproduction to produce a child. One preprint study out of Ireland specifically found that RRM not only yields a higher live birth rate than IVF, but also records “better perinatal outcomes” among women and their babies.

State and federal governments’ encouragement of the multibillion-dollar American ART industry, on the other hand, will only enable that industry to grow. That expansion not only threatens the more than a million lives created and abandoned to cryogenic freezers through IVF, but it also undermines the Trump administration and Kennedy’s commitment to “fresh thinking” on the biggest health crises facing Americans today.

It is noble for the White House, with Kennedy’s support, to promote fertility and growing families. Executing that goal through the promotion of a widely unchecked medical industry known for taking advantage of emotionally and physically vulnerable Americans is far from the best course of action.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.