The Real Reason We're All Googling 'Restorative Reproductive Medicine'

I spent part of this week at a fertility conference, sitting in a talk on "restorative reproductive medicine," a term I'd seen floating around fertility TikTok but never actually had explained to me.

Restorative reproductive medicine, it turns out, means trying to find and fix what's actually causing infertility (endometriosis, thyroid stuff, ovulation issues) before anyone mentions IVF. It sounds reasonable in a vacuum, except this isn't happening in one. I did many rounds of IVF over six years to get my kids, and I couldn't unhear that.

My PCOS wasn't diagnosed until my twenties, years after a doctor put me on the pill "to regulate my cycle" and called it a day. I often think about how differently things might have gone if someone had investigated why my cycles were forty-six days long instead of just managing it. Which is why RRM's pitch is appealing, AND why it's worth being skeptical of.

RRM isn't one governing body, and it's not neutral. Its most established version, NaProTechnology, grows out of Catholic medical ethics and excludes IVF, IUI, donor gametes, and surrogacy, shutting out LGBTQ couples and single parents. It's also a talking point for anti-abortion groups pushing state laws, like Arkansas's, that let providers refuse IVF on religious grounds. ASRM calls this ideology dressed up as medicine. One presenter cited unpublished data claiming nearly 40%(!) of RRM providers aren't medically licensed — reason enough to ask exactly what your own provider's license and training actually cover.

In my (very non-medical) opinion, the real issue isn't RRM versus IVF. It's why some patients go looking for alternatives at all — either because IVF is expensive, or it didn't work, and no one explained why.

Two things can be true at once: some of us will always need IVF, and all of us deserve real answers before we get there.