Under Trump, a New Focus for a Birth Control Program: Helping Women Get Pregnant
The government grants website linked in the article is not helpful. It’s as if someone is trying to hide what’s going on.
A little-noticed plan for an “infertility training center” signals that the administration intends to take a new approach with Title X, which has long helped low-income women access contraception.
By Caroline Kitchener and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
July 18, 2025
The Trump administration intends to use funds from a decades-old federal program that provides birth control to low-income women to ramp up efforts to help aspiring mothers get pregnant, signaling a shift in policy that will appease both religious conservatives and adherents of its Make America Healthy Again agenda.
The first sign of the change appeared on a little-noticed government website last week, in a post offering a $1.5 million grant to start an “infertility training center.” The center would promote “holistic” approaches to combating infertility, such as menstrual cycle education classes that women also take to try to prevent pregnancy without using birth control.
The announcement of the training center is the clearest sign yet that the administration plans to take a new approach with the federal family planning program known as Title X, and point it more toward combating infertility, a goal that President Trump has made part of his agenda.
The announcement is also an early indication that the administration is backing an alternative approach to infertility — one supported by conservative and religious policy groups that are skeptical of in vitro fertilization, even after Mr. Trump promised as a candidate last year to make I.V.F. free. A formal White House report on infertility was delivered to the president in May, several months after Mr. Trump pledged in an executive order to lower the cost of I.V.F., but has not yet been released to the public.
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Caroline Kitchener is a Times reporter, writing about the American family.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
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Your mom can quit her job and be your full-time babysitter. Or ask your parents to give you some money for a house.
Two tone deaf solutions I have heard from republicans in recent years.
It makes me grimly determined to catch up on work and go as far as I can starting now. I really see more purpose than ever in my job as a (yes shitty and mediocre 
) scientist in a hard science (and one with no human angle at all so human versus AI and other lame-brained crap doesn’t come up). The human sciences are for military psyops. The hard sciences are sciences.
My mom’s one wish was that I go as far in the hard sciences as I can. She always wanted to work in the sciences. She went into banking and never respected it. She found physics too hard at the PhD level and got a bank job, but was unhappy with work all her life. She wished she had become a high school physics teacher instead.
I was a lousy daughter in some ways. But this is one thing I can do for my mom who left me far too soon.