An IVF alternative for infertility that’s holistic and ethical

CNA Staff, Mar 4, 2025 / 15:40 pm (CNA).

As in vitro fertilization (IVF) rises in popularity, discussion continues surrounding its ethics as well as about how to respond to the plight of couples struggling with infertility. One group addressing that need is FEMM (Fertility Education and Medical Management), which focuses on the root causes of women’s reproductive health issues, offering various kinds of support for infertility.

Anna Halpine, CEO of FEMM, founded the organization in 2012 to expand options for women’s health care. FEMM provides women from puberty to menopause with health support and information, offering telehealth resources as well as an app to track cycles and symptoms. 

FEMM serves a lot of women who struggle with fertility issues, offering them alternatives to IVF, which is often an arduous and expensive process. 

IVF is a fertility treatment opposed by the Catholic Church in which doctors fuse sperm and eggs to create human embryos and implant them in a woman’s uterus until birth. To maximize efficiency, doctors create excess human embryos and routinely destroy undesired embryos. An estimated 600,000 frozen embryos are in storage in the U.S. alone, with some estimates at upwards of a million.  

The Trump-Vance administration recently initiated an executive order expanding IVF access — a move widely opposed by the U.S. Catholic bishops, who urged restorative reproductive medicine as an ethical alternative to infertility. 

FEMM, which takes insurance, offers an alternative to IVF that looks at women’s health from a holistic perspective. 

“We have a lot of patients who’ve struggled with fertility. Some of them have even failed multiple IVF attempts,” Halpine said. “We love taking care of these patients.”

Halpine noted that going through infertility is always “a very sensitive, private, and personal time.” 

“It’s a very painful phase for couples to go through infertility. It’s very difficult to want to go through your medical history with a lot of providers,” Halpine said. “We understand that, [and] we do think that based on the patient outcomes we’re seeing, we have a lot to offer many women.” 

FEMM begins by looking at how much it can help to “restore health,” Halpine explained. “Infertility itself is not a diagnosis. We want to know what the underlying diagnosis is.”

While in select cases — such as a case where a woman doesn’t have her fallopian tubes — FEMM physicians don’t have the resources to help, in many cases Halpine has seen successes. 

“If necessary surgeries have removed organs that are necessary to a natural conception, we won’t be able to help,” Halpine said. “But in many other instances, we can, because so much [of] the scarring or inflammation that impedes pregnancy, so much of the untreated or undiagnosed endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome that women are left with, which then create pregnancy challenges — a lot of that can still be addressed even later on.”

The FEMM app

The FEMM app, which is free, helps users develop baseline knowledge of their menstrual cycles and reproductive health. If they are struggling with various hormonal or reproductive health problems, FEMM provides a way for them to track and chart symptoms, and connects them to a global network of FEMM doctors and educators to help with treatment. 

“FEMM really started because we saw that despite all of the discussion about women’s health, very little women’s health care is actually available,” Halpine told EWTN News president Montse Alvarado on “EWTN Pro-Life Weekly” on Feb. 27.

“We also saw that we really have the science, the knowledge, and the clinical care to be able to bring this information to women, empower them to understand their own bodies, to know what’s healthy and normal, and to have the freedom and access to health care and information that they need to make the choices they want,” she continued.

“We know that it’s time to change the standard of care,” Halpine said. “Women deserve to be able to receive a diagnosis and treatment of the root cause instead of just Band-Aids for ongoing symptoms.”

Addressing the whole person 

FEMM is dedicated to addressing the whole person so women don’t have to go back and forth between a variety of specialists. 

“Women have this feeling that their body is a whole, and they want health care that addresses that,” Halpine told EWTN. 

The secret to holistic women’s health care “is really reproductive endocrinology,” Halpine explained. 

“Reproductive endocrinology is just the science of hormones, which serve as a conduit through our whole bodies,” she continued. “The brain sends hormones as signals to every system of our body to tell it what to do. Understanding that as a unifying principle really allows us to provide health care to women that answers their whole variety of needs.”

FEMM’s research arm, the Reproductive Health Research Institute (RHRI), develops medical protocol, trains doctors, and approaches women’s health from the perspective that ovulation is a sign of health. 

“Health care cannot be just reduced to women’s issues or specific reproductive or sexual issues,” Halpine continued. “It needs to address the whole range of a woman’s body. And reproductive endocrinology or the knowledge of hormones allows us to help her and her provider to understand what’s going on and understand what’s needed.”

FEMM provides an alternative to the standard, blanket prescribing of contraceptives for various medical issues such as polycystic ovarian syndrome and other symptoms such as acne, hirsutism, weight gain, and heavy bleeding. 

“Contraception is the standard of care for most women for most symptoms,” Halpine told CNA. “It is true that those symptoms will often feel better. But what we want to let young women know is that we can also do more.”

For Halpine, it’s about getting to the root of the problem.

“We want, where we can, to get to the root cause of what’s going on and really restore and correct that. Most women want that as well,” Halpine said. 

The good news, Halpine said, is that “the science has advanced.” 

“We can do more than we were able to do for women in the past, and that’s a really important and powerful message that women love to receive,” Halpine said. “They’re eager to get this care and support. And the better they feel, the happier they are.”

Natural family planning 

FEMM also works with couples using natural family planning (NFP), a method that involves monitoring signs of fertility to determine when a woman is most likely to conceive.  

“FEMM works very well for natural family planning purposes,” Halpine said. “We have guidelines, and we work with couples on a regular basis to help them understand their fertility and how they can use this knowledge to achieve or avoid pregnancy.”

FEMM can help women with fertility awareness “whether it’s spacing her children or whether it’s conceiving and managing and maintaining a healthy pregnancy,” Halpine noted.

This begins by making sure a woman has a healthy cycle, Halpine explained.   

“That provides the groundwork to make sure she has that healthy conception, healthy pregnancy, maintains that pregnancy,” Halpine explained. “So she and the baby are both having those healthy outcomes now and setting up good outcomes for life. So that’s a huge part of the population we love to serve.”

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/262549/femm-takes-holistic-approach-to-infertility-offering-alternatives-to-ivf