Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Sean Cho Ayres, Assistant Professor of English – AI Writing, Kennesaw State University

It’s week one of the semester, the first day of class: 20 students, mostly freshmen, sit silently waiting for our English 101 Writing Composition class to begin. Most have one AirPod in listening to whatever their Spotify AI DJ thinks they want to listen to; some scroll past AI-selected ads for drop-shipped fast fashion. And then someone who has forgotten to silence their phone opens TikTok and the 6-7 second sound blares. They hurriedly close the app, no apology, not even a half-hearted laugh from their classmates.

Welcome to the contemporary college classroom.

I am a college professor working at the intersection of humanities and artificial intelligence, and yes, I believe the latter not only threatens to devalue college, but it also risks stripping humanity from our lives altogether.

It doesn’t have to be this way. AI automating away parts of work and life challenges the next generation of the workforce to re-instill the importance of interpersonal social skills, and I see the college classroom as the ideal place for this rehumanization to take place.

Here’s my framework for building a classroom centered around student socialization. The goal: Equip students with the vital human skills needed in the AI-augmented workforce.

Target: Bring humanity to work

Young adults sit in college classes fully aware that an AI-infused workplace is just on the other side of graduation. But they – and everyone else – have little idea how best to prepare for it.

How to make this work for today’s college students? Known for the infamous Gen Z stare, having their faces glued to their screens, and their fidgeting, doomscrolling thumbs, Gen Z has been pegged as the generation that lacks the social skills needed to succeed in an AI-augmented workforce.

To me, this represents a clear tension between the young adults they are and the adults they need to be.

It’s easy for my rhetoric to give off “kids these days” vibes. But I’m a young millennial. Which is to say, I too don’t know what to do with my hands at dinner parties and have to make a conscious effort to maintain eye contact.

Simply put: I teach what I wish I would have been taught.

Shifting the mentality of the classroom

In the college classroom, it’s all too easy to talk at the students for 90 minutes – to just be a professor with a slide deck who tosses in a few canned jokes that you know work because you’ve already said them a dozen times. Time passes, and you hear the next class waiting outside the door.

“All right, y’all,” you say. “Let’s get outta here.”

The students dash off to their dorm rooms or dining hall, and wait to do the homework until midnight. You wait a few weeks too long to grade it – also at midnight, right before midterm grades are due – like two digital ships passing each other in the moonlight.

Instead, I offer a different mindset: The classroom is not some intermediary between two computers – the assignment creator and the assignment doer, which only serves to build an “us versus them” mentality between student and professor.

Rather, it’s us together in the battle against the midterm or final exam.

“OK, that sounds great, random guy on the internet,” I hear you say from the other side of the screen. “But how?”

Small social interactions

We academics like to use fancy words phrases like “student-centered classroom” or “student-driven approach.” What this means for me is simple: I constantly interact with the students and make social interactions integral to the classroom experience.

I used to hear professors brag about knowing each of their students’ names, so I made it a priority to do the same. But now I don’t think that’s enough. Instead, I’m asking the frat bros-future-businessmen and the honors-society-students-soon-to-be-doctors to get to know each other as peers and future colleagues.

As I shuffle into class and try to remember if I capitalized my first pet’s name as I log into the computer, I simply ask students to tell each other: What was the most challenging question on the homework? What did you do this weekend? And more importantly, what did you wish you did?

At the end of class, I give five minutes for students to plan out when they’re going to complete the homework, and then I have them talk to the person next to them about it.

These conversations often lead to friendships formed over common struggles: Alex would love to do his English paper tonight but has to study for his bio test, and Professor Smith’s exams are the worst. As luck has it, James is also in the lecture. “Man, you’re in the class too? Where do you sit? Professor Smith talks way too fast!”

Centering the importance of public speaking

Sure, in my writing-intensive classes we turn in term papers, they get grades, and yes, some students use AI. That’s all fine and well, but that’s not the important part. Instead, I’m interested in students knowing the material well enough to articulate it to the group – well enough to tell us why the subject matters to them, to us and to the world at large.

So we spend a week where students give a short 5-10 minute presentation on their work. “Tell us why fast fashion is destroying the planet. Tell me why we need to care more about the future of pork and factory farming practices.”

And for those brief moments of positive peer pressure as the students stand at the front of the class, it doesn’t matter that ChatGPT helped with the commas, did the googling or even wrote the entire conclusion because “I was just getting too tired.” What matters is the students’ ability to look a group of 20 peers in the eye and bring the private work of thinking, writing and sometimes even chatbot-prompting into the public sphere.

The point isn’t whether students used AI to compose the words; it’s whether the ideas feel like they originate from the person behind the words. Whether they’ve wrestled with them long enough to know what they’re trying to say. If ChatGPT helped them get there, fine. What matters is what they did after. Did they question it? Did they revise it? Did they decide it wasn’t quite right and try again?

That’s the work I care about. To me, it’s the difference between turning something in and actually turning something over — in your mind, in your hands, to the people around you. That’s what makes it real. What makes it theirs. What makes it college.

Back in the classroom …

It’s week 12. I just sent my students off into a small-group discussion on “the value of adapting AI-augmented practices into your daily life.” Five minutes go by. “All right, y’all, let’s bring it back in.” But no one stops talking.

And in that small moment as I pull my phone out to play the Snapchat notification sound, Rizzlord soundtrack or whatever the sound meme of the day is to get their attention, I know I’ve done my small part as an educator: teaching students how to be human again.

Sean Cho Ayres does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How I rehumanize the college classroom for the AI-augmented age – https://theconversation.com/how-i-rehumanize-the-college-classroom-for-the-ai-augmented-age-269168

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Brian Mittendorf, Professor of Accounting, The Ohio State University

Charitable giving in the United States has changed significantly in recent years.

Two of the biggest changes are the swift growth of donor-advised funds and the increasingly blurred lines between charity and politics.

Donor-advised funds, or DAFs, are charitable investment accounts. After donors put money or other financial assets into these accounts, the assets are technically no longer theirs. But they do get a say in how those funds are invested, as well as when and which charities should get some of the money.
Americans gave nearly US$90 billion to DAFs in 2024 – up from the $20 billion DAFs took in a decade earlier.

One distinguishing feature about DAF donors is that when they dispatch money from their charitable accounts, they fund politically engaged charities at higher rates than people who give directly to charity.

That’s what we, two scholars who research the flow of money between donors and nonprofits, found when we conducted a study examining the links between donor-advised funds and donations to charities that are politically active. Our results will be published in a forthcoming issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum, a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Resembling family foundations

As charitable investment accounts, donor-advised funds straddle a middle ground between family foundations and organizations doing direct charitable work.

Like foundations, DAFs give donors a sense of long-term control over funds they’ve designated for charitable spending in the future. But because DAFs are accounts held within certified public charities, often those affiliated with financial institutions like Fidelity and Vanguard, they offer added tax benefits and simplicity.

DAFs let donors take charitable tax deductions immediately, and then decide later how much of that money to give to which charity – and when – by telling the account managers what to do.

Timing gifts this way can increase the tax advantages tied to charitable giving through tax deductions. And DAFs help donors do this without the expenses, staffing and complexity of running their own foundations.

These advantages – coupled with persuasive marketing campaigns – have helped spur a DAF boom. Donor-advised funds held $326 billion in 2024.

More politically engaged charitable activity

We consider charities “politically engaged” if they either do lobbying or have related organizations that participate in political campaigning. These groups span the political spectrum: For example, they include both the National Rifle Association and the Environmental Defense Fund.

We gathered data from the nearly 250,000 charities in the U.S. that filed a 990 form with the Internal Revenue Service from 2020 to 2022. The country’s largest charities must file these informational forms annually and make them available to the public.

When we crunched the numbers, we discovered that nearly 6% of payments from DAF accounts go to politically engaged charities. In comparison, other funding sources paid out only 3.6% to politically engaged charities.

This means a funding rate from DAFs is 1.7 times the benchmark level. When it comes to fringe hate and antigovernment charities, overall funding levels are low, but the DAF difference is more pronounced – DAF donors fund these groups at a rate 3.5 times that of other donors.

Giving donors more privacy

One other advantage DAFs offer donors is that they provide more anonymity than if donors give to a cause directly.

Under current disclosure rules, when donors give more than $5,000 to any charitable nonprofit – whether it’s their local food bank or animal shelter or art museum – both the charity and the IRS have to know who they are. When donors give that much to private foundations, it becomes part of the public record as well.

But when donors give any amount, even if it’s much more than $5,000, through their DAFs, even the charity that ultimately gets the money may not know the donor’s identity.

This anonymity may be one reason donors more often use DAFs to give to organizations that engage in politics, either directly or indirectly.

To be sure, charities are permitted to engage in different types of political engagement to varying degrees. In fact, U.S. charities have long been important public policy advocates. And it is also understandable that donors might want to be anonymous. Yet the use of DAFs to provide gifts to fringe groups suggests this lack of transparency is not always a good thing.

The rules around donor disclosure were originally set up to prevent private interests from abusing the system.

This is the reason that foundations – like those set up by tech billionaire Elon Musk or Google co-founder Larry Page – must publicly disclose both their major donors and their grant recipients.

But when these foundations make grants to donor-advised funds, the digital trail becomes a dead end. The public has no way to know which charities the foundations are ultimately funding with their grants after the money enters a DAF’s coffers.

Consistent with this arrangement, we found that the DAFs that get more grants from foundations tend to fund politically active organizations at higher rates.

Changing the charity landscape

As DAFs continue to expand, further research can help cast light on what effect they will ultimately have. Though much research and many proposed new rules have focused on whether Americans need to move the money in their DAFs out to charities more quickly, we’re focused on where that money goes.

In examining tax filings, we have also learned that some charitable sectors get more money from DAFs than others.

For example, social service nonprofits, which include homeless shelters and food banks, get 25% of all giving, but only 20% of DAF giving. This may seem like a small difference, but it can actually represent seismic shifts in where charitable dollars go.

And we’re now examining whether the size of a charity’s DAF program can influence that organization’s behavior. The data collected from 990 forms suggests that even community foundations may become less focused on their local communities when they court DAF donors.

Helen Flannery is employed by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank that has done research related to charity reforms.

Brian Mittendorf does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Donor-advised funds have more money than ever – and direct more of it to politically active charities – https://theconversation.com/donor-advised-funds-have-more-money-than-ever-and-direct-more-of-it-to-politically-active-charities-270758

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Matthew Jordan, Professor of Media Studies, Penn State

News of Netflix’s bid to buy Warner Bros. last week sent shock waves through the media ecosystem.

The pending US$83 billion deal is being described as an upending of the existing entertainment order, a sign that it’s now dominated by the tech platforms rather than the traditional Hollywood power brokers.

As David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, put it, “The deal with Netflix acknowledges a generational shift: The rules of Hollywood are no longer the same.”

Maybe so. But what are those rules? And are they being rewritten, or will moviegoers and TV audiences simply find themselves back in the early 20th century, when a few powerful players directed the fate of the entertainment industry?

The rise of the Hollywood oligopolies

As Hollywood rose to prominence in the 1920s, theater chain owner Adolf Zuker spearheaded a new business model.

He used Wall Street financing to acquire and merge his film distribution company, Famous Players-Lasky, the film production company Paramount and the Balaban and Katz chain of theaters under the Paramount name. Together, they created a vertically integrated studio that would emulate the assembly line production of the auto industry: Films would be produced, distributed and shown under the same corporate umbrella.

Meanwhile, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner – the Warner brothers – had been pioneer theater owners during the nickelodeon era, the period from roughly 1890 to 1915, when movie exhibition shifted from traveling shows to permanent, storefront theaters called nickelodeons.

They used the financial backing of investment bank Goldman Sachs to follow Zucker’s Hollywood model. They merged their theaters with several independent production companies: the Vitagraph film distribution company, the Skouras Brothers theater chain and, eventually, First National.

But the biggest of the Hollywood conglomerates was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, created when the Loews theater chain merged Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Mayer Pictures.

At its high point, MGM had the biggest stars of the day under noncompete contracts and accounted for roughly three-quarters of the entire industry’s gross revenues.

By the mid-1930s, a handful of vertically integrated studios dominated Hollywood – MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO and 20th Century Fox – functioning like a state-sanctioned oligopoly. They controlled who worked, what films were made and what made it into the theaters they owned. And though the studios’ holdings came and went, the rules of the industry remained stable until after World War II.

Old Hollywood loses its cartel power

In 1938, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission sued the “Big Five” studios, arguing that their vertically integrated model was anti-competitive.

After the Supreme Court decided in favor of the U.S. government in 1948 – in what became known as the Paramount Decision – the studios were forced to sell off their theater chains, which checked their ability to squeeze theaters and squeeze out independent producers.

With the studios’ cartel power weakened, independent filmmakers like Elia Kazan and John Cassavetes flourished in the 1950s, making pictures like “On the Waterfront” that the studios had rejected. Foreign films found their ways to American screens no longer constrained by block booking, a practice that forced exhibitors to pay for a lot of mediocre films if they wanted the good ones, too.

By the 1960s, a new generation of filmmakers like Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick scored big with audiences hungry for something different than the escapist spectacles Hollywood was green-lighting. They took risks by hiring respected writers and unknown actors to tell stories that were truer to life. In doing so, they flipped Hollywood’s generic formulas upside down.

A decade ago, I wrote about how Netflix’s streaming model pointed to a renaissance of innovative storytelling, similar to the period after the Paramount Decision.

By streaming their indie film “Beast of No Nation” directly to subscribers at home, Netflix posed a direct threat to Hollywood’s blockbuster model, in which studios invested heavily in a small number of big-budget films designed to earn enormous box office returns. At the time, Netflix’s 65 million global subscribers gave it the capital to produce exclusive content for its expanding markets.

Hollywood quickly closed the streaming gap, developing its own platforms and restricting access of its vast catalogs to subscribers.

Warner Bros. bought and sold

In 2018, AT&T acquired Time Warner, the biggest media conglomerate of the time, and DirectTV. It hoped to merge its 125 million-plus telecommunication customers with Time Warner’s content and create a streaming giant to compete with Netflix.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and the theatrical model for film distribution collapsed.

The pressure on AT&T’s stock led the company to sell off HBO and WarnerMedia to Discovery in 2022 for $43 billion. Armed with the HBO and Warner Bros. libraries – along with the advertising potential of CNN, TNT and Turner Sports – CEO David Zaslav was bullish about the company’s potential for growth.

Warner Bros. Discovery became the third-largest streaming platform in terms of subscribers behind Netflix and Disney+, which had gobbled up 20th Century Fox.

But the results have been bad for audiences.

In 2023, Zaslav rolled out a bundled streaming platform called Max that combined the libraries of HBO Max and Discovery+, which ended up confusing consumers and the market. So it reverted back to HBO Max because consumers recognized the brand.

Zaslav then decided it was more cost effective to cancel innovative projects or write off completed films as losses. Zaslav often claims his deals are “good for consumers,” in that they get more content in one place. But conglomerates who defend their anti-competitive practices as signs of an efficient market that benefit “consumer welfare” frequently say that, even when they are making the product worse and limiting choices.

His deals have been especially bad for the television side, yielding gutted newsrooms and canceled scripted shows.

Effectively, in only three years, the Warner Bros. Discovery merger has validated nearly all the concerns that critics of “market first” policymaking have warned about for years. Once it had a dominant market share, the company started providing less and charging more.

Meet the new boss – same as the old boss

If it does go through, the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger will likely please Wall Street, but it will further decrease the power of creators and consumers.

Like other companies that have moved from being a growth stock to a mature stock, Netflix is under pressure to be profitable. Indeed, it has been squeezing its subscribers with higher fees and more restrictive login protocols. It’s a sign of what tech blogger Cory Doctorow describes as the logic of “enshittification,” whereby platforms that have locked in audiences and producers start to squeeze both. Buying the competition – HBO Max – will mean Netflix can charge even more.

After the Netflix deal was announced, Paramount joined forces with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Saudi Sovereign Wealth fund and others to announce a hostile counteroffer.

Now, all bets are off. Whichever platform acquires Warner Bros. will have enormous power over the kind of stories that get sold and told.

In either case, Warner Bros. would be bought by a direct competitor. The Department of Justice, under the first Trump administration, already pushed to sunset the Paramount Decision, claiming that the distribution model had changed to such an extent that it was unlikely that Hollywood could ever reinstate its cartel. It’s hard to imagine that Trump 2.0 will forbid more media concentration, especially if the new parent company is friendly to the administration.

No matter which bidder becomes the belle of Trump’s ballroom, this merger illustrates how show business works: When dominant platforms also own the studios and their assets, they control the fate of the movie business – of actors, writers, producers and theaters.

Importantly, the concentration is taking place as artificial intelligence threatens to displace many aspects of film production. These corporate behemoths will determine if the film libraries spanning a century of Hollywood production will be used to train the machines that could replace artists and creatives. And with each prospective buyer taking on over $50 billion in bank debt to pay for the deal, the new parent of Warner Bros. will be looking everywhere for profits and opportunities to cut costs.

If history is any guide, there will be struggles ahead for consumers and competing creatives. In a media system that has veered back to following Hollywood’s yellow brick rules of the road, the new oligopolies are an awful lot like the old ones.

Matthew Jordan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Whether Netflix or Paramount buys Warner Bros., entertainment oligopolies are back – bigger and more anticompetitive than ever – https://theconversation.com/whether-netflix-or-paramount-buys-warner-bros-entertainment-oligopolies-are-back-bigger-and-more-anticompetitive-than-ever-271479

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Jenalee Doom, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Denver

Imagine you got a rough night of sleep. Perhaps you went to bed too late, needed to wake up early or still felt tired when you woke up from what should have been a full night’s sleep.

For the rest of the day, you feel groggy and unfocused. Things that are usually fun or exciting don’t give you the same level of pleasure. You don’t have energy to exercise, so you avoid it. You don’t feel motivated to see friends, so you cancel plans with them. You focus on your rough day as you try to fall asleep that night and start to have anxiety about the next day. Instead of getting the restful night of sleep you need, you have another night of poor sleep. You become caught in a vicious cycle of poor sleep and depressed mood.

Sleep and mental health problems often go hand in hand. Sleep problems are a core symptom of depression. In addition, there is strong evidence that sleep problems contribute to many mental health disorders, including schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Yet our mental health also affects how well we sleep. Issues such as distressing thoughts and trouble relaxing can make it difficult for people to fall asleep or stay asleep, exacerbating sleep problems.

These issues are particularly pronounced during pregnancy, when the circular effects of inadequate sleep and mental health challenges can have harmful effects for mothers and their offspring.

We are a developmental psychologist and a doctoral student in psychology who study sleep and mental health from pregnancy through adulthood. As researchers in this field, we see the impacts of sleep and mental health problems firsthand.

Sleep and mental health problems are so entangled that it is unsurprising that they can each make the other worse. But it does make treating them more challenging.

Biology of sleep and mental health

Researchers and medical professionals know that sleep is essential for the body and brain to function properly.

Sleep is important for establishing circadian rhythms, which optimize alertness during the day and rest at night. When sunlight fades in the evening, the brain produces more of the hormone melatonin, and your core body temperature drops to promote sleep. When the brain detects sunlight, it reduces melatonin production, and body temperature increases to promote wakefulness.

Although light and dark are the most important signals to the brain about when you should be awake and when you should be sleeping, other things such as stress, disruptions in daily routines and social interactions can also throw off your circadian rhythm.

Circadian rhythms affect other important biological processes, including the body’s production of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol follows a daily rhythm where it is highest soon after waking in the morning and lowest in the middle of the night. Disruptions in normal sleep can lead to difficulties in daily regulation of cortisol levels, which can have negative effects on mental health and the ability to effectively manage stress.

Sleep is central to the proper functioning of the immune system, which in turn has implications for mental and physical health. Sleep disturbances have been linked to poorer immune responses against viruses and other challenges to the immune system, making it harder to stay healthy and to recover after getting sick.

Sleep disturbances also lead to greater inflammation, which is when the immune system’s natural responses become overactive. Inflammation underlies mental and physical health problems, including depression, heart disease and cancer.

How poor sleep leads to behavior changes

Chronic disruptions to a person’s natural circadian rhythm – such as people who work night shifts or who switch between day and night shifts – lead to greater risk for both depression and anxiety.

Shift work is an extreme example of disrupting the natural pattern of sleeping at night. However, less severe types of sleep problems, such as not getting enough sleep or waking up feeling tired, are also bad for mental health.

Sleep disruptions make it more difficult to regulate emotions. Having too little or poor quality sleep make handling everyday stressors more difficult. This is because sufficient sleep is necessary for effective problem-solving, memory and focusing. The combination of impaired emotion regulation and stress management abilities are a recipe for greater mental health difficulties.

One key reason why poor sleep and mental health struggles can become so problematic and difficult to treat is that without adequate sleep, it’s challenging to muster energy for healthy activities such as exercise and maintaining social relationships.

What’s more, when decision-making is impaired by poor sleep and negative emotions, people are more likely to reach for alcohol, drugs and unhealthy foods to cope with stress. These unhealthy behaviors can, in turn, reinforce the cycle by interfering with sleep.

Sleep and mental health problems in pregnancy

These cycles between poor sleep and mental health challenges can be especially problematic during pregnancy.

Common pregnancy symptoms include nausea, heartburn, back and joint pain, cramps, a frequent urge to pee and contractions, all of which can make it more difficult to get restful sleep.

Sadly, around 76% of pregnant women report having sleep problems at some point in their pregnancy, compared with only 33% in the general population. Relatedly, about 1 in 5 pregnant women in the U.S. struggle with mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

Our team’s new research, published in December 2025, further establishes these links between sleep and mental health. We found that during pregnancy, mental health problems contribute to sleep problems over time and that sleep problems in turn can exacerbate mental health problems.

This cycle can also have negative effects on the fetus and on the child after birth.

Prenatal sleep problems such as short sleep, sleep apnea and restless sleep can lead to preterm births and low birth weight in newborns.

A large study in Sweden in 2021 found that pregnant women who frequently worked the night shift or quickly shifted between night and day work in early pregnancy showed a three-to-four times greater risk for having a preterm birth. Preterm birth and low birthweight are associated with greater cardiovascular risk in both mothers and their offspring.

Prenatal maternal sleep problems can also lead to problems later in the child’s development. A review we also published in 2025 found that children of mothers who had sleep problems in pregnancy tend to have more sleep problems themselves. Our review also reported that children of mothers with prenatal sleep problems are more likely to develop obesity and have more behavioral problems in childhood.

Talking to your doctor about these concerns

In our opinion, it should be standard to screen for sleep problems at medical visits, given the potential implications of inadequate sleep for both mothers and their babies.

If you’re close to someone who is pregnant, consider asking how their sleep is and how they’re feeling. If they note ongoing sleep issues or emotional or behavior changes, you can ask if they have talked to their doctor.

They may feel overwhelmed and need support in talking to their doctor or help finding resources. The Sleep Foundation’s website has a list of sleeping tips for pregnant women as well as guidelines for when to speak with a doctor.

If you are the person experiencing these issues, you can report sleep problems to your doctor and ask for guidance for improving sleep.

If you’re experiencing difficulties with depression or anxiety, tell your doctor and ask for resources. There are mental health resources specific to pregnancy that can help. You can also find mental health professionals through Psychology Today’s find-a-therapist tool.

Healthy sleep is a necessity for improving your mental health during pregnancy and at all times of life.

Jenalee Doom receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Melissa Nevarez-Brewster receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

– ref. Sleep problems and depression can be a vicious cycle, especially during pregnancy − here’s why it’s important to get help – https://theconversation.com/sleep-problems-and-depression-can-be-a-vicious-cycle-especially-during-pregnancy-heres-why-its-important-to-get-help-264737

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Emma Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics, Villanova University

Along the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to make in vitro fertilization, or IVF, free – part of his party’s wider push for a new American “baby boom.”

But in October 2025, when the administration revealed its IVF proposal, many health care experts pointed out that it falls short of mandating insurance companies to cover the procedure.

Since Trump returned to the White House, it has become clear just how fraught IVF is for his base. Some conservative Christians oppose IVF because it often involves destroying extra embryos not implanted in the woman’s uterus.

According to Politico, anti-abortion groups lobbied against a requirement for employers to cover IVF. Instead, some vouched for “restorative reproductive medicine” – a term that has been around for decades but has received much more attention, especially from conservatives, in the past few months.

Proponents of restorative reproductive medicine tend to present it as an alternative to IVF: a different way of treating infertility, focused on treating underlying causes. But the approach is controversial, and some practitioners closely link their treatments to Catholic teachings.

As a scholar of religion, I study U.S. Catholics’ varied perspectives on infertility, seeking to understand how religious beliefs and practices influence physicians’ and patients’ choices. Their perspectives help provide a more nuanced understanding of Christianity’s role in the U.S. reproductive and political landscape.

Defining restorative reproductive medicine

Clinics that advertise themselves as offering restorative reproductive medicine try to diagnose underlying issues that could make conception difficult, like endometriosis. Typically, a patient and provider will closely monitor the patient’s menstrual cycle to identify potential abnormalities. Interventions include hormone therapies, medications, supplements, surgeries and lifestyle changes.

Much of the approach resembles the initial testing used to evaluate patients in mainstream reproductive endocrinology and infertility clinics. However, restorative reproductive medicine clinics do not typically offer IVF or other assisted reproductive technologies.

Depending on who you ask, proponents are not necessarily opposed to IVF; they see their treatments as another option to explore. Some clinicians, however, closely link their treatment offerings to their religious commitments and opposition to abortion.

Restorative reproductive medicine has prompted criticism from professional medical organizations. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued a statement in May 2025 calling it a “rebranding” of standard infertility treatment, with “ideologically driven restrictions that could limit patient care.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a brief warning that it is a “nonmedical approach” that threatens to impede access to IVF.

These critics are concerned that the focus on lifestyle changes and surgery may not address patients’ difficulties conceiving, while putting them through other unsuccessful treatments.

Church teachings

Today, restorative reproductive medicine is often described as gaining steam with conservative Christians and the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement. Its roots, though, are decades old, and largely Catholic.

Part of the Catholic Church’s objection to IVF stems from a concern that unused embryos are often discarded and destroyed. The church’s position is that all embryos ought to be treated with the same respect afforded a person – one of the key reasons its teachings oppose abortion.

Disapproval of IVF also stems from the church’s official teachings on marriage. According to this teaching, marriage has two chief ends, which it calls “procreation and union”: Typically, procreation is understood to mean having children, while union involves physical, emotional and spiritual intimacy. In this understanding, sexual intercourse should preserve what the church calls an “inseparable connection” between these two meanings.

The Catholic Church opposes artificial contraception because its goal is to block procreation. Instead, Catholics are encouraged to use “Natural Family Planning” – tracking a woman’s cycle so that couples can choose to abstain from sex during fertile periods. Similarly, it opposes artificial insemination and IVF because, by moving fertilization out of the body and into the lab, the process separates procreation from the act of sexual intercourse.

Survey data suggests most U.S. Catholics do not agree with these official stances, nor do they follow them.

Catholic doctors who do agree with official church teachings, however, have played a key role in developing infertility treatments that align with them. One of the most influential is Dr. Thomas W. Hilgers, who co-developed a “Natural Family Planning” method called the Creighton Model. In the early 1990s, he also developed NaProTechnology, an approach that seeks to identify fertility issues using cycle tracking, and then treat them with various medical and surgical interventions.

The NaProTechnology approach could be said to fall under the umbrella of restorative reproductive medicine, but it has mostly been used by Catholic reproductive health clinics and hospitals. Catholic physicians’ networks promote it, as do parishes and dioceses.

Navigating infertility

For Catholics who share the church’s official perspective on IVF, NaProTechnology and the clinics offering it are often a welcome alternative. Several of the Catholic women I interviewed as part of my academic research had also been to mainstream fertility clinics, but they felt that those providers did not offer much apart from IVF.

By contrast, the clinics offering NaProTechnology were often cheaper, in part because they do not offer IVF. They were also easier to navigate, since clinicians shared these patients’ religious views. Many felt that the providers were able to spend more time with them, helped them learn about their bodies, and were committed to understanding underlying issues beyond infertility.

However, others found clinics offering NaProTechnology to be lacking, often because clinicians weren’t up front about its limitations, especially when it comes to male infertility. Some patients felt that clinicians weren’t willing to admit drawbacks, for fear it would encourage couples to try IVF.

Most Catholics dealing with infertility, however, find themselves in mainstream clinical settings that offer IVF. Women I interviewed who opted for IVF were frank in their critiques of church teachings and their skepticism of Catholic clinics. Many took issue with the underlying assumption that the people who ought to be procreating are heterosexual, married couples and that conception is usually possible without the help of IVF.

However, many of these women were also dissatisfied with the approach that mainstream clinics take. Some felt that those clinics were focused on profit – a concern shared by some scholars scrutinizing the fertility industry. Some women also felt pressured to genetically test their embryos for chromosomal abnormalities and to discard unused embryos, even after explaining to staff that destroying them would be out of step with their moral commitments.

Understanding patient experiences in either kind of clinic helps underscore the difficulties many people face navigating infertility – and the stakes of policy reform.

The Trump administration’s plan largely maintains the status quo for IVF access while making more room for alternative treatments. But it intensifies questions about how the government responds to religious beliefs about reproductive health care, especially disagreements about the moral status of embryos. For now, patients and providers will continue to navigate a fractured landscape.

Emma Kennedy is affiliated with the Center for Genetics and Society.

– ref. How a niche Catholic approach to infertility treatment became a new talking point for MAHA conservatives – https://theconversation.com/how-a-niche-catholic-approach-to-infertility-treatment-became-a-new-talking-point-for-maha-conservatives-265461