“You can’t get more pro-life than this,” Trump said last October, after approving a Domestic Policy Council suggestion to encourage insurance coverage for Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM). As a candidate, Trump promised to mandate full insurance coverage for IVF. During his term, the White House has eliminated the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Assisted Reproductive Technology surveillance team, and has backed efforts led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, to promote Restorative Reproductive Medicine in lieu of established reproductive healthcare services.
What is Restorative Reproductive Medicine? Invented in the early 2000s by a complex constellation of anti-abortion groups, conservative pronatalists, and separate well-intended women’s health advocates, the term repackages basic fertility care as a natural, low-cost — and therefore superior — solution to infertility and declining birth rates. Proponents claim that one can overcome infertility simply by monitoring hormones and menstrual cycles, changing lifestyle habits, and receiving select treatments for chronic reproductive and endocrinological conditions. In a 2025 report, the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation called RRM “the highest standard of medical care,” designed to “treat the root cause”.
Is the foundation correct? Will limiting the availability of proven health services like IVF somehow help Americans facing infertility?
Proponents claim that RRM addresses prevailing gaps in women’s health by providing “natural” alternatives to unreliable medical care. They note that women’s health constitutes less than 10% of NIH funding, and that those experiencing conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis and fibroids can go years without diagnoses. But rather than bridging these gaps, RRM merely appropriates the cause of gender inequality for a nationalist agenda of traditional family values that confine women to the domestic sphere.
Take, for example, the Reproductive Empowerment and Support Through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE) Act. Introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Tennessee congresswoman Diana Harshberger in May 2025, the act claims that RRM restores “the normal physiology and anatomy of, the human reproductive system, without the use of methods that are inherently suppressive, circumventive, or destructive to natural human functions.” That phrasing is important. Words like “suppression, circumvention, and destruction” clearly signal an ideological backlash against empirically proven services like birth control, IVF and abortion. It’s no coincidence that anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion, and anti-IVF groups instead promote RRM and fertility awareness-based methods of birth control, particularly to promote higher birth rates among young white women.
Ironically, RESTORE — a version of which became law in Arkansas in April 2025 — further states that measures to restore fertility can include hormonal replacement therapy. This act is proven especially incoherent by the fact that such treatments contain the very synthetic hormones used in contraception, abortion and gender affirming care. Such a contradiction speaks to how RRM is not about helping Americans fulfill their decisions as much as it is about limiting them.
RRM also seems to ignore maternity hospital deserts and high miscarriage rates, issues traced back to Medicaid cuts, rollbacks of protections against environmental toxins, and state criminalization of abortion. In other words, RRM is dressed in a pronatalist language that equates reproductive health with women’s ability to bear children. But it conveniently evades the effects of regressive measures like Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health (2022) and the Big Beautiful Bill (2025) on Americans’ reproductive health, safety, and decision-making.
Trained medical experts, such as The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), raise further concerns. According to physicians, RRM legislative proposals undermine scientific consensus and patient-centered reproductive healthcare. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) emphasizes that fertility specialists and reproductive endocrinologists have long offered the same services now being rebranded as RRM. Legally codifying RRM, says ASRM president Elizabeth Ginsburg, merely creates insurance barriers to assisted reproductive technologies — the next step to which people turn when initial fertility measures prove unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, RRM is gaining traction. The Trump Administration, reallocating Title X funds, recently offered a $1.5 million dollars grant to start an “infertility training center”. Since 1970, Title X funding has allowed clinics across the United States to provide birth control, sexual health services and basic fertility care to low-income Americans. Trump’s infertility training center, by contrast, aims to educate people on the root causes of infertility and provide “holistic” treatments. This fallacious idea of reproductive healthcare is grounded in pro-family values, yet it undercuts decades-long advancements in family planning services. While the Trump Administration and its pronatalist constituents envision “cures” for infertility, their restrictive measures such as Medicaid cuts and abortion bans have skyrocketed maternal mortality rates and chronic health issues for both parents and children.
By seeking to boost birth rates through federal and state policy, the Trump Administration appropriates discourse around women’s health — and shrouds the more insidious goals of nationalist pronatalism. Just as ICE detains and deports higher rates of Black and Brown residents, RRM initiatives tend to favor the reproduction of Americans who fit white nationalist population ideals. These reproductive priorities echo the histories of birth control and federal aid programs, which sometimes coerced Black and Brown women from having children.
As a key component in a larger movement against reproductive freedom and decision-making, RRM is coercion masquerading as empowerment. It disguises longstanding reproductive health concerns as a political agenda designed to control reproduction and subordinate women. Any good-faith effort to promote reproductive healthcare must include the complete and broad spectrum of services advanced by scientific and clinical research. Moreover, Americans’ reproductive health can only truly be realized when everyone’s reproduction is equally valued, and when their own decision-making is put first.
Anna Wood is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.