I'm thinking about IVF
First, do you have an infertility diagnosis?
This is not a rhetorical question. Many couples who pursue IVF do so without ever identifying the underlying reason they’re not conceiving having met only the diagnostic threshold of six to twelve months of trying without a successful pregnancy. Infertility is a symptom of reproductive health conditions shared equally between men and women, and typically involves four or more contributing factors. This is important to keep in mind, especially since IVF itself doesn’t treat the underlying conditions. It is a procedure to create human embryos that bypasses the causes of infertility in the man and/or woman’s body.
That means that IVF will not fix or address the specific conditions causing infertility, such as thyroid dysfunction, luteal phase defect, endometriosis, low progesterone, blocked fallopian tubes, low sperm count, or low sperm motility. In reality, there are up to 100 possible underlying conditions that IVF leaves untouched.
If you have not worked with an RRM-trained physician who has charted your cycle and done a full workup, we would strongly encourage you to begin there.
If you’re considering IVF, it’s important to understand what the process looks like:
Once assessments have been completed (however thorough, or not), doctors begin with hormone injections to stimulate a woman’s egg production with the goal of creating as many eggs as possible–far more than the single egg a woman naturally produces per month. This requires a strong cocktail of hormonal drugs–including an off-label use of Lupron, the “puberty blocker” drug–that has a harsh impact on the woman’s physical health and mental well-being.
For men, clinics collect their sperm, often relying on masturbation and pornographic materials to do so. There are also “at-home” options.
Once the egg(s) and sperm have been collected, doctors begin assessing the maturity and health of the gametes. Specialized embryologists then begin the process of fertilization by placing a single egg with sperm in a petri dish.
The goal is to create as many human embryos as possible to increase overall success rates, but this is also where many couples are caught off guard — they didn’t anticipate the clinic fertilizing all their eggs and suddenly find themselves with far more embryos than they imagined.
They aren’t merely ‘potential’ life the way eggs or sperm are. They are actual human lives. Once created, couples only have four options before them: they can implant, freeze, destroy, or place their human embryos up for adoption. That’s it.
The numbers most clinics don’t lead with:
IVF results in a live birth only 25–35% of the time per cycle overall — and less than 10% of the time for women over 40. One cycle costs between $12,000 and $30,000, with couples on average relying on 2-3 cycles before a successful live birth.
Medical risks for mothers include gestational diabetes, hypertension, and higher rates of cesarean delivery. Babies born via IVF face higher rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, and certain health conditions.
But the number we find most sobering is this: of the estimated 4.1 million embryos created through IVF each year, only a fraction, roughly 97,000, result in the live birth of a child.
The rest have been indefinitely frozen, destroyed, donated to research, or lost to failed implantation. That means that the success rate for the human embryos is less than 10%. These are very low ‘success’ rates indeed.
The reality is that in our pursuit of having a child, the standard IVF process results in the creation and loss of many, many human lives.
This is why it isn’t a question of criticizing the children who are born through IVF, but a much deeper consideration about what happens to the other 90% of embryonic children created.
Moreover, with 40% of all IVF cycles involving something called preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), which tests human embryos for their sex or potential health outcomes, parents face more pressure than ever to choose the “best” human embryos while indefinitely freezing or destroying the rest. This is at its core a eugenic practice that reduces human life to a list of possible characteristics or conditions. It degrades human life and rejects the inherent worth and dignity of each person from the moment of conception to natural death.
While IVF may succeed in creating a human embryo, it does not improve egg and sperm quality, decrease miscarriage rates, balance hormone levels, and optimize a woman’s body to support the child in utero. By bypassing the body, IVF does not treat or heal the underlying causes of infertility that caused the problems to occur in the first place. Instead, it relocates the creation of life outside the one flesh union of husband and wife and into the laboratory.
There are more ethical approaches.
Some physicians practice what might be called a “life-sparing” approach to IVF, which involves using fewer medications, creating fewer embryos, and handling each one with greater care by committing to no genetic testing and no human embryo destruction. The goal here is either single embryo creation–to ensure that no human embryo is “leftover”–or limited embryo creation. Dr. John Gordon with Rejoice Fertility in Knoxville, TN is one of the best examples of a fertility clinic relying exclusively on this approach, and he is one of the only clinics to do it.
There are also more ethical forms of IVF, such as gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT). With GIFT, doctors stimulate and collect egg and sperm from the woman and man respectively, but instead of creating human embryos outside the womb, they place the egg and sperm separated by an air bubble in a catheter and insert it into the woman’s body. If conception occurs, it occurs within the woman’s body and only involves the creation of a single human embryo at a time.
As we explore in “I want to have kids,” we highly recommend seeking out a restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) doctor, specifically looking into medical specialties such as Natural Procreative Technology (NaProTech), Female Education and Medical Management (FEMM), and NeoFertility to assess, diagnose, and treat infertility.
NaProTechnology is the oldest, developed since the 1970s, with an emphasis on cycle charting and medical/surgical interventions.
FEMM specializes in hormonal imbalances and cycle charting.
And NeoFertility, which finds its origins in NaProTech, has a specific focus on autoimmune conditions.
Each of these specialties addresses couples struggling with infertility or individuals with specific reproductive health problems they want to treat with or without pregnancy in mind.
While an umbrella term, RRM refers to a scientific approach to reproductive medicine that seeks to cooperate with or restore 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. It begins with the understanding that infertility isn’t a standalone disease, such as a cancer tumor or heart disease, but a symptom of underlying conditions. Thus, to truly treat infertility, doctors must identify and treat what is causing the outcome of infertility in the first place. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for infertility, and treatment plans must reflect that.
RRM treatments work to restore, not bypass, the body’s natural functions. They combine cycle tracking, targeted lab testing, lifestyle interventions, medical and hormonal therapies, and corrective surgeries to restore natural fertility for both men and women.
It’s important to be clear here about what RRM is, and isn’t. For example, a Catholic OB-GYN is not the same as an RRM doctor. A nutritionist is not the same as a NaProTechnology physician. An integrative medicine doctor is not the same as a FEMM-trained clinician. All of these practitioners may be wonderful people doing genuinely good work. But they are not trained in the specific medical specialty that uses charted cycle data as a clinical diagnostic instrument to identify and treat the underlying causes of infertility or in the hormonal, medical, and/or surgical interventions that may be required to restore one’s fertility. They aren’t sufficient, in short, for root cause analysis and treatment of infertility.
The best part? Success rates for RRM are comparable with or slightly higher than IVF outcomes. It’s not necessarily a question of treating the root causes or having a child. The answer may be one in the same.