NYT Wants You To Think IVF Is The Only Way To Have A Career

Women are being oppressed by their own bodies.

That, at least, was the premise of a recent New York Times piece by Ruxandra Teslo, who decried “a world where the timelines of our bodies and the timelines of our ambitions rarely align.” By this she means that the biologically optimal time for women to have babies is also when people enter adulthood. Thus, for women pursuing increased educational and economic opportunities, that often means delaying motherhood, perhaps until it is too late.

And so Teslo is promoting a “fertility abundance agenda — a plan to help women build the families they want, and on their own terms, by expanding access to fertility care and modernizing the systems that support it.” This agenda mostly consists of government subsidies and insurance mandates for egg freezing, IVF, and so on. The goal is to give women more time for their ambitions by slowing down the relentless ticking of their biological clocks.

It won’t work.

It is not just that egg freezing is less effective than advertised, but that encouraging women to plan on delaying motherhood will only exacerbate the problem. Establishing a norm of egg freezing and IVF will further entrench the view that marriage is a capstone in life, rather than a foundation, and that children should be timed with an eye on career optimization, which usually means waiting until the last fertile minute. Even with more taxpayer-funded technological reproductive help, a lot of women just won’t make these biological buzzer-beaters.

The Problem is Cultural

The real problem is not a lack of subsidies for IVF and related technologies, but a culture of declining and delayed marriage, which also is at the root of many other ills. However, Teslo simply accepts this as inevitable and complains that, “For years, pronatalist policy in the United States has been largely conservative, emphasizing earlier childbearing and implicitly asking women to trade autonomy for family formation.”

Well, yes. It will always be easier for women to have children during their years of peak fertility. And “family formation” always requires a loss of autonomy. Or, to be more precise, having a baby breaks the illusion of autonomy, which cannot be sustained amid the dependencies and obligations of parenting. Babies are dependence personified, and so their mothers and fathers are not autonomous, but are instead obligated to care for them. Indeed, the ideal of autonomy is an anti-human lie. We are born dependent and attain only partial and temporary independence in our lives. And this is as it should be — humans are meant to be relational and interdependent. One who can live alone would be, as Aristotle put it, either a beast or a god.

Teslo misunderstands the nature of who we are and how we flourish. She prioritizes ambitions over relationships and achievements over love. She views human nature as an obstacle, as illustrated by her anger at society for forcing “women to reorganize their entire lives around a biological deadline while offering little support when that deadline approaches.” But what she demands is technological control to help women reorganize their lives away from their biology. Teaching women to despise and fear their bodies, to view themselves as defective men, will only make women unhappier.

Profits for the Industry

Dumping government cash into an unreliable technology will not fix problems that are the result of a broken culture. The only solution is the hard work of repair and reform to establish a healthy relational and family culture. But government subsidies will make a lot of money for those who are on the receiving end of that handout. And as The New York Times noted a year ago in a piece on a terrible IVF mix-up, the IVF industry is “heavily dominated by private equity” and “rife with for-profit, high-volume fertility clinics operating in a regulatory dead zone.” Ah.

These private equity owners will profit as women put off having children and therefore become increasingly reliant on the IVF industry to have children late in life. And so would the venture capitalists funding eugenic embryo screening companies. Government IVF mandates and subsidies are not about helping women and families, but about lining pockets.

Restoring Natural Fertility

This explains Teslo’s dishonest attack on alternatives to the IVF industry. She denigrates restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) approaches as having “little scientific basis,” a claim she supports only by linking to an American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) webpage that accuses RRM of focusing too much on endometriosis as a cause of fertility problems. Yet that same document admits that “endometriosis excision, fertility awareness, and lifestyle changes may have value for some patients and should be a part of conversations people have with their doctors.” Which is to say, there is a scientific basis for the RRM approach, even if the left-wing ACOG author is irate that RRM approaches prioritize restoring natural fertility over rushing patients into IVF — note that the ACOG page also whines that “RRM narrowly defines family by excluding LGBTQ+ people.”

Furthermore, only a few sentences after Teslo bashes medical approaches that seek to restore fertility, she argues that “Women’s health, and reproductive science in particular, is chronically underfunded… Endometriosis is one striking example: It affects about one in 10 women of reproductive age, causing chronic pain and infertility, yet remains one of the most underfunded diseases relative to its burden.” So which is it? Is endometriosis a huge problem for women’s health and fertility that needs more research and treatment focus, or is it a distraction deployed by those pushing unscientific approaches to fertility medicine?

The truth is that medical approaches that focus on restoring natural fertility are often both successful and much cheaper than egg freezing and IVF. And so they are a threat to the profits that private equity and venture capital hope to extract from IVF industry.

Furthermore, the people who practice and use restorative approaches tend to be Christians who view human embryos as persons, not property, and who care more about Heaven than earthly riches and accolades. They reject the sexual revolution, embrace family life as a vocation, and welcome children as blessings. And when they must, they bear the cross of infertility with grace. In short, they not only proclaim, but seek to live out, an alternative to the greed, lust, and ambition that have resulted in so many lonely adults and empty cradles.

This is the way to a better life and a better culture, but it will not make private equity and venture capitalists rich(er). Thus, it is no wonder that it is attacked in The New York Times. But a quick, taxpayer-funded technological patch will not repair a broken culture. For that there is no alternative to the hard work of learning to love and care for others.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of “Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All” (Ignatius, 2025).