As the United States enters an unprecedented era of declining birth rates, a curious phenomenon continues to manifest in legacy media outlets: a rigidly negative and dismissive portrayal of highly effective natural methods of treating infertility known as restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) and an unwavering promotion of assisted reproduction technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) that involve the destruction of human embryos and have a track record of negative health outcomes.

With the U.S. rapidly heading toward a demographic cliff as birth rates crater, sociologists have pointed to the growing trend of women waiting until almost age 30 before having their first child. The average age for first-time mothers has steadily increased since 1970, when the average age was 21.4. This has contributed to a nosediving fertility rate as millions of women have far fewer children than they desire for the simple reason that they have fewer fertile years in which to have children. It has also led to millions of women in their late 30s and 40s with diminished fertility desperately seeking a child through any means necessary, particularly IVF procedures.

Assisted reproduction technologies like IVF involve the manipulation of eggs and sperm in petri dishes to create embryos in a laboratory and the artificial insemination of those embryos into women’s uteruses. But the oft-ignored dirty little secret of IVF — which is rarely mentioned by legacy media outlets — is that over 97% of the embryonic children created in the IVF process are discarded, miscarried, frozen indefinitely, or donated for experimentation.

What’s more, an extensive body of evidence shows that children born from IVF suffer from a wide range of health complications. Congenital conditions include “elevated risks … across multiple organ systems, including the cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, digestive, and genitourinary systems.” Higher rates of syndromes associated with epigenetic alterations have also been documented, including Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, Russell-Silver syndrome, Angelman syndrome, and Prader-Willi syndrome. “These conditions are especially concerning because they arise at the earliest stages of development and often carry lifelong consequences for both children and their families,” notes Francisco Güell, a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS).

Güell further points to a laundry list of adverse conditions of IVF-born children immediately after birth, including “higher rates of preterm birth, extreme prematurity, low birth weight, neonatal seizures, need for intensive care, and perinatal mortality.” Even years after birth, IVF-born children are susceptible to “increased incidence of cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism spectrum disorders, hypertension, asthma, allergies, type 1 diabetes, language disorders, and certain pediatric cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma, retinoblastoma, and kidney and liver tumors.”

As Güell observes, the principles of developmental biology make it clear why these adverse health outcomes are likely occurring. “The earliest stages of embryonic development are extraordinarily sensitive, and the manipulation of gametes and embryos in laboratory conditions may interfere with the mechanisms that regulate gene expression.”

In stark contrast to artificial reproduction technologies like IVF is the natural field of infertility treatment known as restorative reproductive medicine (RRM). Instead of manipulating embryos that result in a profusion of adverse health risks, RRM “focuses on identifying the underlying health conditions that contribute to reproductive dysfunction and suboptimal reproductive health, treating them to restore the natural functions of the reproductive system.” The practice involves a variety of methods to treat infertility, including menstrual charting to track hormonal cycles, screening for conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), thyroid dysfunction, and endometriosis, andrology testing for men, and personalized treatment plans when abnormalities are discovered.

Research has shown that “32.1% of women who have failed multiple IVF treatments can expect to have a baby using RRM,” and “couples with infertility that had not previously used IVF but who had struggled for an average of 5.6 years without having a baby” had an overall success rate of 61.5%.

These facts are conspicuously absent from legacy media reports on the subject. A recent New York Times profile of Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who specializes in reproductive technology and bioethics, casually dismisses RRM and Waters’s advocacy for it based on the characterizations of unnamed “professional medical associations,” who apparently claim that the RRM movement is “motivated by ideology rather than solid clinical evidence — a backdoor way to further limit reproductive rights on religious grounds.” Other “medical experts” are afraid that RRM will “steer couples with fertility issues away from more sophisticated technologies like I.V.F.” and will give them “false hope.”

One wonders if the hundreds of thousands of couples who have tried IVF and failed to conceive were also given “false hope”? Data from 2021 alone shows that among 238,126 IVF patients, there was a 37.3% chance of live birth. This means that about 150,000 women were given actual false hope with IVF in one year alone.

In any event, experts like Joy Stockbauer, a policy analyst for the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, say that a large part of legacy media’s squeamishness around RRM methods has to do with how it threatens a sacred cow of the secular culture: hormonal birth control.

“I think the mainstream media criticism of RRM has a few layers to it,” she told The Washington Stand. “On one level, our culture is terrified of any critique of hormonal birth control, so a form of fertility care predicated on healing women’s hormones naturally and, in many cases, helping them recover from years of using hormonal birth control runs counter to their narrative that these abortifacients are totally harmless or even helpful for women’s health.”

Medical experts have indeed pointed out that the documented side effects of birth control pills like Opill include depression, abnormal bleeding, ovarian cysts, and increased risks to those with liver disease or breast cancer. Studies also show that women who begin taking birth control as teenagers have a 130% higher rate of depression than those who do not.

“On another level,” Stockbauer continued, “almost everyone knows someone who used IVF to conceive or was conceived using IVF, but very few realize the difficult road this form of assisted reproductive technology really entails. They don’t hear about the lost embryos, the months of trial and error, the thousands upon thousands of dollars spent to achieve even one full-term pregnancy. There’s a total lack of education on which of these routes to growing a family is more effective and more beneficial for women’s holistic health in the long run.”

With the unbalanced reporting surrounding infertility that is occurring among legacy media outlets like The New York Times and others, Stockbauer emphasized that much more can be done to spread the truth.

“Married couples facing infertility deserve to know that there are alternatives to IVF that won’t wreck them spiritually, physically, or financially,” she insisted. “This education could come from countless sources: through marriage counselors, health systems, church leadership, sex education programs, and even government leaders. Perhaps some of the most effective education will take place between friends, saying, ‘They told us IVF was our only option, but they were wrong.’”