Published March 17, 2025
Shortly before the election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared that President Trump had “asked [him] to end the chronic disease epidemic in [the United States].” RFK Jr.’s affirmative response and his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda garnered a flurry of support for the incoming administration, undoubtedly impacting election results in favor of President Trump. Soon after entering office, President Trump signed two MAHA executive actions.
The MAHA agenda uniquely unites different health-focused groups from the “crunchy moms” to “independent doctors,” who often critique Big Food, Pharma, and Fertility. MAHA has opened the door to public discussion of health issues that do not align with, and may even oppose, the mainstream narrative on medicine, pharmaceuticals, and food. The movement has received its fair share of backlash from both Right and Left, especially from those concerned with how it could erode trust in public healthcare, which has already been waning in recent years. But MAHA represents a revitalization in healthcare that is sorely needed.
With 204,000,000, or “60% of U.S. adults hav[ing] at least one chronic disease,” an administration committed to making America healthy must prioritize root cause treatment across all areas of medicine. Chronic health conditions, including reproductive health conditions, have increased over the past 50 years. MAHA encourages “root cause” treatment for “chronic disease,” which includes addressing “poor diets, environmental toxins, and inadequate healthcare systems.”
President Trump has time and again made clear that he wants to help families have children. As a recent executive order put it, he is committed to tackling the infertility crisis and to “mak[ing] it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.”
Infertility, a symptom of some underlying reproductive dysfunction or chronic health condition, is, unfortunately, pervasive among Americans. At least one in five couples in the United States suffer from infertility, but little is offered to these couples by the medical profession other than assisted reproductive technology (ART). ARTs, such as in vitro fertilization, circumvent infertility by producing embryonic life outside of the body in Petri dishes. Infertility remains untreated even as children are produced through third-party technology.
As with most reproductive-generated symptoms, conventional medicine offers women pharmaceutical Band-Aids and technology rather than identifying and treating the underlying chronic health conditions. Consistent with MAHA, properly treating infertility requires addressing its root cause.
One of the leading contributors to infertility is reproductive conditions, including endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and uterine fibroids. Reproductive conditions often lead to hormonal imbalances, insulin resistance, inflammation, vitamin deficiencies, anemia, and obesity, yet they are some of the most overlooked and under-researched conditions in healthcare. Because ongoing reproductive health conditions often lead to comorbidities among male and female populations, addressing chronic reproductive diseases could also simultaneously eliminate other chronic diseases separate from reproductive organs.
Mainstream reproductive medicine routinely leaves individuals with reproductive health conditions in limbo for years. Often, these individuals know their symptoms indicate an underlying illness or condition, but because medical professionals overlook these symptoms, it can take a decade to receive a diagnosis for a reproductive health condition. During this time, medical professionals prescribe pharmaceuticals to suppress the pain. But suppression does not treat disease. Instead, conditions such as endometriosis and adenomyosis continue to fester and spread, leaving patients with advanced stages of disease and high surgical costs. Additionally, delayed treatment can expedite compromised fertility, thus developing a pipeline for couples to fertility technology where they will spend $12,000 to $30,000 per cycle of in vitro fertilization.
Conversely, restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), an umbrella term for root cause reproductive treatment, offers comprehensive evidence-based medical protocols that identify and treat the underlying reproductive health conditions causing infertility.
The two infertility responses, ART and RRM, differ in almost every way. The ART industry seeks to produce the maximum number of embryos possible to enable, in most cases, preimplantation genetic testing to determine the “healthiest” embryo to implant. The embryos deemed unworthy by the fertility clinic or lab face destruction. Other embryos are indefinitely cryopreserved. Of the millions of embryos produced through ART, only 2.3% will experience a live birth. In vitro fertilization now has a higher death toll for embryonic life each year than abortion.
RRM never leads to the intentional death of embryonic life. It does not produce life outside of the body, but instead restores the health of a couple so that they can conceive naturally.
RRM does not present quick fixes or pharmaceutical Band-Aids, nor does it rely on Big Pharma or Fertility. Instead, it seeks to identify, often through fertility awareness-based methods, the reproductive dysfunction in an individual or couple. It employs natural hormone balancing, nutritional and dietary improvements, environmental toxin elimination, and, when necessary, root cause surgery. Furthermore, a comparison study on the effectiveness and cost of ART and RRM found that “the average cost of IVF is 20 times greater than fertility treatments that use only medications, making IVF inaccessible to many couples.” RRM is, in most cases, more affordable than assisted reproductive technology.
This specialty in reproductive medicine does not treat each condition and symptom with a piecemeal attitude but rather employs collaboration to examine the body holistically. By changing the outlook of reproductive medicine from suppressive and circumventive to comprehensive and holistic, RRM endeavors to return the body to how it was designed to function.
Root cause treatment—the preferred terminology and technique for RRM— squarely aligns with RFK’s and Trump’s focus on MAHA.
For MAHA, supporting RRM is simple. There are several things the new administration can do to make fertility healthy again. For example, the FDA’s webpage on endometriosis is sorely out of date and in need of updating. Instead of recommending medically induced menopausal drugs to young women with endometriosis, women should be directed to real treatment of the disease, which is a laparoscopic excision procedure. Next, chronic reproductive conditions are severely under-researched, and reproductive conditions that “disproportionately affect women, all attract much less funding in proportion to the burden they exert on the US population than do other conditions.” RRM specialists have, in the absence of government funding, produced their own databases and research that verifies their medical protocols and methods. NIH should devote funding and grants to build upon this research and make it more widely known.
In Congress, Senators Hyde-Smith and Lankford have introduced a simple and cost-neutral piece of legislation, the Reproductive Empowerment and Support through Optimal Restoration (RESTORE) Act, to encourage research and education within federal programs on RRM. With Congress’s support of root cause reproductive treatment, the administration could make small changes to align federal reproductive health information and programs with RRM to address chronic reproductive health conditions and infertility.
RRM fulfills two Trump administration priorities. It is an answer to President Trump’s desire to tackle the infertility crisis and is in harmony with MAHA’s agenda to eliminate the chronic disease epidemic in the United States. Americans voted for a renewed vision of medicine and food. They voted to be listened to and not ignored by profit-driven industries. They voted for a healthier nation. A healthier nation means healthy couples having children and healthy moms and dads devoted to raising the next generation of Americans.
Natalie Dodson is a Policy Analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on a range of initiatives focusing on sexuality, gender ideology, religious liberty, healthcare rights of conscience, abortion, and nondiscrimination in EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project (ASAP).
