Threats to in vitro fertilization dominated national headlines throughout 2024, highlighting the conservative establishment’s scramble to find middle ground between anti-abortion groups’ opposition to IVF and voters’ overwhelming support for it. Despite fertility care’s popularity, conservative politicians have blocked legislation that would codify fertility treatments as a federal right by repeatedly obstructing the Right to IVF Act.

Now, anti-abortion leaders are preparing to let the newly-reinstated presidential administration know that Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed support for in vitro fertilization is, as Students for Life’s Kristan Hawkins put it, “no bueno.” Instead, some leaders are pushing for their own alternative treatment: so-called “restorative reproductive medicine,” an alleged alternative to conventional fertility assistance, which rejects “methods that are inherently suppressive, circumventive, or destructive to natural human functions.”

They’re even hoping to codify their own supposed alternative to the Right to IVF Act by supporting a bill promoting education and research on so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine.’ Last June, Republican senators introduced the Reproductive Empowerment and Support through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE Act) — notably just weeks shy of the two-year anniversary of the 2022 Dobbs decision. If passed, RESTORE would allocate federal funding to expanding public knowledge of so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine,’ which its proponents also sometimes call “integrative fertility.” Whatever its name, the practice purports to use holistic approaches to address reproductive health issues such as difficulty becoming pregnant or wanting to avoid pregnancy altogether. However, mainstream medical experts have described so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ as “a political rather than a scientific concept.”

Far from a well-intentioned attempt to seek middle ground, conservatives’ turn against IVF and pivot to so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ is instead about advancing one of the anti-abortion movement’s top priorities following the overturning of Roe v. Wade: fetal personhood, a legal concept that aims to grant legal protections to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses, beginning at the point of conception.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life, and other influential anti-abortion lobby groups have already called on the incoming Trump administration to use the 14th Amendment to establish fetal personhood nationwide. Any policy legally validating fetal personhood presents a stark danger to IVF since the process commonly creates more fertilized eggs than is ultimately required to help account for failed implantation or other complications.

Major anti-abortion groups seeking to ban all abortion, such as Live Action and Students for Life, have pushed fetal personhood as a reason to oppose IVF and have suggested that frozen embryos created through fertility treatments are owed legal rights. On X (formerly Twitter), Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, posted that IVF “commodifies women’s bodies and disposes of ‘unwanted’ babies.” And earlier this year, Live Action founder Lila Rose said, “Destroying a baby conceived via IVF or indefinitely freezing them is a violation of their basic human rights.”

The RESTORE Act and so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’s’ timely emergence amid threats to IVF from anti-abortion leaders, justices, lobbyists, and lawmakers reflects a remarkable strategic clarity among abortion opponents: when and if the Trump administration finds a way to support fetal personhood, anti-abortion legislators will need to sell the IVF-supporting public on some kind of substitute. And they are already working on their pitches.

Largely based off of model legislation written by Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation and Natalie Dodson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the RESTORE Act has been touted by both right-wing think tanks. In an op-ed promoting the legislation, Waters and Dodson suggest that so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’s’ “treatments are not anti-IVF; rather, they offer couples more ways to get at the heart of the problem.”

Whether or not so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ is itself “anti-IVF,” its most vocal proponents are certainly anti-abortion, and some practitioners of integrative fertility may have financial incentives to steer people to their own clinics and fertility tracking apps — and away from IVF. Fertility specialists with ties to anti-abortion leaders and groups have been at the forefront of advocating for so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ as an alternative to conventional fertility treatment.

In an April interview with Lila Rose, endocrinologist and physician Dr. Lauren Rubal called integrative fertility “a very patient-centered approach” using “not just conventional treatments,” but also “other approaches such as foundational lifestyle changes as well as judicious use of nutraceuticals, botanicals, supplements.” In many ways, so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ and “integrative fertility” share tenets of perhaps more familiar concepts such as the “rhythm method” or “natural family planning,” wherein individuals track different types of biometric data over time to help achieve or avoid pregnancy by estimating peak times of ovulation.

Advocates of integrative fertility tend to avoid the obvious when talking about “success rates,” for which there is little data. “Success” depends on how diligently individuals can follow the required regimen of FABMs, or “fertility awareness-based metrics,” such as taking notes on their basal body temperature or cervical mucus on a regular basis. Health experts emphasize the difference between “perfect use” and “typical use,” as the average person is likely to make some errors while recording their own biometric data, suppressing the success rate.

The innate variability of so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ contrasts claims made by its proponents who allege that FABMs have success rates on par with hormonal birth control when used as a method of contraception — but only with the “when practiced correctly” caveat. Rubal, for example, once suggested that low pregnancy rates experienced by people using IVF may be connected to physicians steering their patients towards hormonal contraceptives as “band-aids,” asserting that so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ is better at addressing issues with conceiving by assessing the pregnant person’s hormone imbalances. But the medical and scientific consensus is clear: hormonal contraceptives have no impact on future fertility.

Claims about so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’s’ efficacy are dubious at best; there is no evidence that shows it is an accessible, similarly effective alternative to conventional fertility treatments. In this way, so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ joins the likes of so-called “abortion pill reversal” and disinformation about medication abortion as another example of anti-abortion movement’s rejection of mainstream, evidence-based medicine.

On top of making spurious health claims, some integrative fertility advocates appear to have a personal as well as a political interest in dissuading the public from IVF and hormonal contraceptives. Dr. Lauren Rubal was previously listed as a medical provider for FEMM, an organization behind a fertility-tracking app that has financial ties to the anti-abortion movement and may have an incentive to undermine IVF usage as a market competitor. And the primary researcher behind a 2022 study promoting so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ — which concludes that the practice can be used to success “even with long-standing infertility, recurrent miscarriage, and multiple unsuccessful embryo transfers” — is Dr. Phil Boyle, the president of the International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine and co-founder of the fertility-tracking app ChartNeo. Additionally, the study fails to disclose Boyle’s affiliations to the anti-abortion movement, as Mother Jones identified Boyle as “a member of the anti-abortion group Irish Doctors for Life.”

If efforts like the RESTORE Act succeed, so-called ‘restorative reproductive medicine’ could be as lucrative a financial opportunity for abortion opponents as are anti-abortion pregnancy centers, which have seen a surge in taxpayer funding post-Dobbs. And without legal protections for IVF and other conventional fertility treatments that are opposed by anti-abortion politicians, judges, organizations, and leaders, rulings like that of Alabama’s Supreme Court on “extrauterine children” signal a future where IVF access mirrors abortion access: contingent on geography, financial means, and other privileges.

But there’s no reason to think IVF opponents will be happy with a “states’ rights” version of IVF access any more than they are satisfied with the status quo on abortion. Their campaign to convince the public otherwise, through legislation like the RESTORE Act and the soft-pedaling of integrative fertility, is only about inching the anti-abortion movement closer toward its ultimate goal: outlawing abortion — as well as IVF and some forms of contraception — by codifying fetal personhood.