Less than 50 years ago, the first child conceived by in vitro fertilization was delivered in Oldham, England. Louise Brown was heralded as a medical marvel—not only for her parents, who had struggled to conceive for a decade, but also for the world. “At 11:47 pm, on July 25th 1978,” the British paper The Observer declared, “hope was born.”
Thirteen million “test-tube babies” later, Brown is still too young to qualify for social-security benefits, and IVF has gone from science fiction to a household acronym. It accounts for almost one in 36 births in the United States, according to some estimates. In the meantime, another fertility treatment has become much more common: From 2014 to 2024, the number of egg-freezing procedures per year went from 6,000 to 39,000, a sixfold increase. By most obvious standards, the assisted-reproduction industry is thriving. It has allowed countless single people, same-sex partners, and couples dealing with infertility to become parents. It also happens to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
So I was particularly struck by a couple of statistics from this year’s “Singles in America” study, an annual survey of roughly 5,000 people conducted by the Kinsey Institute, in partnership with the dating company Match: From 2017 to this year, the share of respondents who said they would be willing to consider IVF fell by more than half, from 44 to 18 percent. Openness to egg freezing dropped from 33 to 17 percent. Those are steep declines, especially in a time when more people are choosing to become single parents, celebrities have shared their own IVF or egg-freezing stories, and use among the general public keeps increasing. (Singles’ interest in adoption also plummeted, the Kinsey researchers found—but actual adoption rates, too, have declined.)
The reasons are impossible to name with certainty. But while thousands of Americans are relying on fertility treatments, it may be that millions of others simply want to believe that they’ll never have to.
That participants have cooled on alternative ways to have children could reflect that Americans have, in fact, cooled on having children in general. In the 2017 “Singles in America” poll, 80 percent of respondents younger than 40 said they felt it was important to find a partner who wanted to have kids; this year, only about 38 percent of singles ages 18 to 49 reported wanting children. Half of all participants said financial stability (or lack thereof) is a major factor in that decision. If you’re unsure about parenthood—whether you desire it or whether you can afford it—arduous and expensive fertility treatments might not seem worthwhile. In the United States, a single cycle of egg freezing typically costs about $10,000 to $20,000, including necessary medications; the average cost of IVF is commonly more than $20,000 per cycle. Both processes require the patient to inject hormones, which can cause bloating, bruising, and mood swings, and then to undergo sedation for egg retrieval. They require a life-disrupting amount of time, with no guarantee that they’ll work.
Recent revelations about the fertility industry might be discouraging even to people who do feel sure they want kids. When I spoke with Justin Garcia, the Kinsey Institute’s executive director and the author of the book The Intimate Animal, he mentioned some high-profile cases of “fertility fraud”—including a doctor in Indiana, the home state of the Kinsey Institute, who secretly used his own sperm to father more than 90 kids. “People locally are just totally, totally freaked out by the idea,” he said. And more routine risks and limitations can spook potential customers too. One buzzy 2025 UCLA study found that less than 6 percent of women who froze their eggs from 2014 to 2016 had used them five to seven years later. (“That’s not a reason to not do it,” Garcia said. “It’s an insurance policy.”)
Stark figures have also been reported for IVF and intrauterine insemination, or IUI, a similar procedure; according to a 2022 CDC report, only about 40 percent of embryo transfers result in live births for women ages 35 to 37, and the chances drop precipitously at older ages. My Instagram feed is filled with women posting about their harrowing fertility sagas: years of doctor’s appointments, needles, aches, getting excited about embryos only to grieve when yet another ceases to develop. For viewers muddling through similar experiences, I’m sure, those videos could be comforting. For people like me, imagining someday being in that position, they’re terrifying.
Skepticism toward fertility treatments is creeping in at a time when many Americans, on the left and the right, are already suspicious of medicine and science—and particularly wary about taking hormones. The New York Times reported last year that some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA adherents in the White House are exploring ways to fund “fertility awareness” education: a strategy that involves abstinence from sex during fertile windows, rather than using hormonal methods such as the pill or an IUD, both of which they claim (without solid evidence) can harm one’s health and alter their personality. Alex Clark, who hosts the popular show Culture Apothecary (what she calls a “wellness podcast for cuteservatives”), has referred to hormonal birth control as “poison.” The 2021 documentary The Business of Birth Control, produced by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein, “traces the feminist movement to investigate and expose the pill’s risks alongside the racist legacy of hormonal contraception,” according to its website. (Critics accused it of making dubious claims, including one talking head’s plea to “kill the pill before it kills you.” Lake and Epstein told Rolling Stone that they’re simply trying to “empower people to make informed decisions.”) In 2025, when La Trobe University public-health researchers analyzed 100 TikTok videos about contraception, they found that more than half rejected hormonal methods outright. The videos were riddled with misinformation.
Part of what makes such content alluring can be the idea of returning to what’s “natural”—and fertility treatments clash with that value in every possible way. They’re technologies that allow people to extend childbearing years, or to have biological children when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. But perhaps just as important: They can lead to nontraditional families, which aren’t exactly romanticized by young people at the moment.
On the contrary, Gen Z survey respondents report relatively high levels of support for strict gender roles and old conventions: women staying home and caregiving, for instance, while men work. Garcia has observed this “nostalgia trap,” as he called it, among students where he teaches at Indiana University. Many of them are planning to find a straight relationship and marry young. They tell him that they want to have kids while they’re “still fertile,” he said, “the quote-unquote natural way.” He doesn’t think they realize how impossible a life course is to control. Maybe they’ll marry their college sweetheart and try for kids right after graduating, only to find that they can’t get pregnant. Or maybe they’ll find themselves single at 35, afraid they’ll miss the chance to become a parent. IVF and egg freezing might seem worth considering after all.
[Read: America’s biggest dating company is betting on trad values]
I wondered whether this attitude shift might foreshadow a dramatic drop in assisted-reproduction rates—but Garcia said that would surprise him. Prominent Republican leaders have criticized both IVF and egg freezing, and IVF in particular has been targeted by anti-abortion activists who oppose the discarding of embryos (which they argue are living beings). And yet, most Americans seem to support those procedures in theory. In a 2024 Pew Research Center poll, only 8 percent of participants said they were against IVF. The popular sentiment is less wrong for you and more not right for me. But ultimately, “you don’t know until you know,” Garcia said. “Until you’re in a situation where you’re in a doctor’s office and saying, We’ve been trying for a year. And what’s the next step?”
Perhaps the “Singles in America” result never showed a true rejection of any treatment or type of family. More than anything, it might just reveal a failure of imagination.
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