Leaders of a little-known alternative reproductive health movement are getting a boost from Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s rise to power — even as their movement is simultaneously co-opted by conservatives who want to use it to marginalize in vitro fertilization.
Advocates for restorative reproductive medicine say it offers a cheap, holistic way to treat reproductive problems like repeated miscarriages, endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. The MAHA movement seems to agree: Last month, leaders of the International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine took part in a roundtable discussion on women’s health and fertility hosted by the MAHA Institute and The Heritage Foundation.
Tracey Parnell, a doctor and IIRRM’s global director of communications and development, said IIRRM is eager to leverage its overlap with the MAHA movement to increase awareness of alternative reproductive health practices and promote research into how drugs affect female bodies differently than male bodies.
Parnell described RRM’s relationship with MAHA as a “Venn diagram.”
“We have a lot of parts that don’t connect,” she said. “But the basic premise that they were speaking on — healthy babies, healthy mothers, healthy pregnancies, informed consent — those were issues that certainly overlapped with components that we are quite passionate about.”
But even as RRM’s supporters seek to navigate the murky waters of the MAHA movement’s relationship to evidence-based science, their work is being invoked by Republican legislators and advocacy groups seeking to restrict access to IVF and other more traditional fertility treatments.
RRM’s predicament is an example of how challenging it’s been for alternative health practitioners who see themselves reflected in the MAHA movement to take advantage of the moment — how they have to thread the needle to get the MAHA boost without becoming ammunition for groups railing against both conventional and unconventional therapies.
So far, advocates for RRM feel confident that they’ll be able to do just that.
“From a global perspective, just the simple fact that there is increased awareness of restorative reproductive medicine is amazing,” said Parnell.
IIRRM touts RRM as a more “natural” way of treating fertility issues. The aim is to achieve pregnancies without the use of IVF or other assistive reproductive technologies, which the IIRRM rejects as “masking” the true causes of infertility. It emphasizes menstrual cycle tracking and hormonal testing and implements both treatments commonly used in conventional reproductive medicine, like hormone therapies and surgery, as well as less orthodox therapies like supplements and diets.
IVF can cost tens of thousands of dollars, is not always covered by insurance and involves physically demanding procedures. It’s also become a purported priority for Trump: The president issued an executive order earlier this year calling for greater access to IVF.
Many of the tenets of RRM, like pushing for more research into women’s health issues and the importance of individualized care, are supported by evidence and in agreement with mainstream reproductive health practitioners. But RRM has also been used as a tool to justify restrictions on IVF, genetic testing or embryo creation, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists calls RRM a “nonmedical approach.”
“Legislation that prioritizes RRM over evidence-based fertility treatment is an example of harmful interference in the practice of medicine,” the group said in a memo.
Some Republican senators have endorsed legislation promoting RRM. Last summer, Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith and James Lankford introduced a bill in response to Democrats (symbolically) voting on a bill that would create federal protections for IVF and other fertility treatments, which was itself in response to Trump’s newfound support for the procedure.
The Republicans’ bill, the RESTORE Act, suggested that IVF is used too often. Lankford told NOTUS at the time that he sees IVF as a “really expensive last resort.”
Monica Minjeur, a family physician and the U.S. director of communications and development for the IIRRM, said IIRRM wasn’t even aware of the bill’s existence until after it was introduced.
“We were shocked,” said Minjeur. But she added that the organization thought the bill did a “good job” bringing awareness to RRM, even if there were some areas where it needed “additional help.” (House Republicans introduced another version of the RESTORE Act in May.)
Lankford told NOTUS last week that he’s had conversations with the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House about policies and administrative actions that could support RRM, like specialized training for medical practitioners.
“We’re trying to be able to help people go through the process of infertility,” said Lankford. “We have specialists in that, but we need to make sure our generalists and our family doctors especially have some level of training.”
In an email to NOTUS, an HHS spokesperson said, “HHS is committed to advancing women’s health through evidence-based research, policy, and programming that address the full spectrum of reproductive health across the lifespan.” They did not respond to questions about whether HHS is working with RRM practitioners or considering any policy initiatives that would promote RRM techniques.
But Emma Waters, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said the conservative think tank has a number of ideas for how this administration could encourage RRM.
Waters cited a recent Arkansas law that mandates health insurers “work with doctors who are looking to treat the whole person and go at it in a very comprehensive approach,” as well as fertility awareness training, which Waters described as “training people on how their bodies work, how their cycles work, how to steward their fertility.”
Waters said Heritage is looking at “three big buckets” of initiatives HHS could use to promote RRM: adding “fertility awareness-based methods” to family planning initiatives like Title X-funded projects and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program; conducting studies on diagnosis and pregnancy success rates for RRM through the National Institutes of Health; and asking the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to include more RRM-aligned treatments in its health insurance coding and coverage guidelines.
While there hasn’t been any direct action on any of these proposals so far, Waters said, “All the indicators are pointing to an administration that’s really interested in this issue.”
Both Waters and the doctors working at the IIRRM emphasized that RRM isn’t antithetical to IVF.
“This isn’t an ‘assistive reproductive technology or RRM’ conversation,” Waters said. “It’s a question about how we can provide couples with the best fertility care to address whatever specific issues or conditions they are dealing with, to ensure that if their goal is to have children, that they have the best chance to have the children that they desire.”
“We’re not competing with IVF,” Minjeur said. “We’re a completely different path.”
But The Heritage Foundation does not have a perfect track record when it comes to supporting access to assistive reproductive technologies. In general, groups and advocates who oppose abortion disapprove of the Trump administration’s support for IVF, which they consider to be an unethical practice because it involves the freezing and discarding of embryos.
Conservatives’ focus on putting limits on IVF and similar fertility treatments — as well as promoting RRM as a complete alternative — has alarmed medical experts.
One doctor who has advised the White House on policies to increase access to IVF dismissed RRM as a “made-up word” that just repackages some of what conventional reproductive health practitioners already do.
“Conventional fertility doctors, if I could be so bold as to speak on their behalf, are fine and dandy with people who want to optimize normal reproductive function,” said reproductive endocrinologist Kaylen Silverberg. “If and when that doesn’t work, we are ready to go and do things that are proven scientifically to work.”
Silverberg said he had been asked by White House officials for his opinion on RRM, and made his thoughts on the movement very clear to NOTUS: He called the notion of HHS promoting RRM an “affront” to the reproductive health community.
At least one administration member is onboard with RRM, however. Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Sara Brenner joined the MAHA roundtable last month, where she said that she “can’t even tell you how much I love every topic that’s going to be discussed today.” She was, she said, MAHA before there was MAHA.
Other supporters of alternative treatments for reproductive issues say they believe Kennedy, the secretary of HHS, and the MAHA movement’s willingness to embrace unconventional methodologies could be a boon for understudied issues in women’s health, even if they don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of the platform.
Sarah Hill, a psychology professor at Texas Christian University and author of books about the health effects of birth control and periods, was a speaker and panelist at the MAHA Institute roundtable. She said she hadn’t yet connected with anyone from HHS, but she would push for the department to increase women’s awareness of the complexities of the reproductive system.
“Cycles are about more than just periods and having babies,” Hill said. “Not understanding how to support your hormones and not understanding if there’s an issue with your hormones, I think that that is a huge disservice to women.”
But Hill admitted that she had some concerns about linking up with the MAHA movement.
“What I worry about is that there are some things that are a little bit kooky from a scientific perspective,” Hill said.
Still, Hill told NOTUS that she was excited for the opportunity to increase awareness of the dearth of research into how drugs affect women’s bodies.
“We’re just being shoehorned into this system that was designed around male bodies,” said Hill. “And that’s got to stop.”