You know those words that attach themselves to you like cheap stickers from a gumball machine, the kind that leave a sticky residue no matter how carefully you peel them off? For me, one of those words is natural. It gets lobbed at anyone who manages to conceive without a medical team in the room, often by people who don’t realize their “natural” journey involved ovulation predictor kits, prenatal vitamins engineered in a lab, and a carefully timed schedule that would make a Swiss watchmaker weep. The other word, of course, is artificial. That’s the one they give the rest of us.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, the way we describe how a family comes to be. It’s not just semantics; it’s a whole hierarchy dressed up in adjectives. The language of family building has become this quiet, persistent narrator that assigns value before a baby even takes a breath. And honestly, it’s exhausting. So let’s pick at the scab a little, shall we? I promise it’ll be uncomfortable, maybe even a little darkly funny, because if we don’t laugh we’ll just be crying into our overpriced co-pays.
The Myth of the ‘Natural’ Conception
Let’s start with the golden child of the vocabulary: natural. In the world of making babies, “natural” is supposed to mean something pure, unmediated, almost holy. It conjures images of a couple gazing into each other’s eyes by candlelight, their bodies intuitively knowing what to do without a single beeping machine in sight. It’s a lovely story. It’s also, for a staggering number of people, a complete fiction.
Here’s what “natural” actually looks like for many: tracking your basal body temperature with a thermometer that connects to your phone via Bluetooth. Peeing on sticks until your bathroom counter looks like a crime scene. Taking supplements with names that sound like minor deities—CoQ10, myo-inositol, that one with the unpronounceable name that costs forty dollars a bottle. Is that natural? It’s certainly not picking wild berries and hoping for the best. We’ve just collectively decided that some interventions are invisible, so they don’t count.
The real kicker is that “natural” is almost always a retrospective label. Nobody gets it stamped on their forehead at the moment of conception. It’s a story we tell after the fact, once there’s a heartbeat to point to. The couple who tried for three years, did three rounds of Clomid (which, let’s be real, is a drug, not a lifestyle choice), and finally conceived on the month they “relaxed”—we call that natural. The baby born from IVF using the mother’s own egg and the father’s own sperm, carried in the mother’s own uterus—we call that artificial. It’s a categorization based less on biology and more on how many people were in the room when the magic happened.
The Weight of ‘Artificial’
If “natural” is a gold star, “artificial” is a scarlet letter. It’s the word that gets whispered in support groups and plastered across insurance denial letters. Artificial insemination. Artificial reproductive technology. The term itself suggests something counterfeit, like a fake handbag sold on a street corner. You half expect someone to squint at your baby and say, “It looks so real!”
I’ve sat in enough clinic waiting rooms to know the strange intimacy of that space. You’re surrounded by other people who also have “artificial” stamped on their charts, and there’s a weird solidarity in it. We’re all there, flipping through magazines from three years ago, trying not to make eye contact, our bodies full of hormones that make us cry at car commercials. It’s the most human, vulnerable, deeply un-artificial experience I’ve ever had. And yet the language sticks.
What’s truly bizarre is how the word “artificial” erases the body’s role entirely. As if an embryo transferred during IVF just… floats there, independent of the person carrying it. As if pregnancy itself—the nausea, the fatigue, the weird cravings for pickles at 3 a.m.—is somehow less authentic because the sperm and egg met in a petri dish. The placenta doesn’t check the receipt. The uterus doesn’t ask for a backstory. It just does the work, the same bloody, messy, miraculous work it would do regardless.
When Language Erases the Story
Here’s the part that really gets under my skin: this binary language erases the vast, messy middle where most of us live. It pretends there are two tidy boxes—natural and artificial—and every family fits neatly into one. But what about the single parent who used donor sperm? The couple who adopted embryos? The trans man who carried his own child? The family built through surrogacy, where the baby has a biological connection to one parent and a gestational connection to someone else entirely? Where do those stories go in this vocabulary?
They get forced into the “artificial” box, mostly, which is a disservice to everyone. It’s a word that centers the method over the person, the process over the outcome. It suggests that some families are a little less real, a little more manufactured, like they rolled off an assembly line instead of being born from longing and loss and a staggering amount of paperwork.
I think about the language we use for other medical interventions. We don’t call a C-section an “artificial birth,” even though it’s a surgical procedure. We don’t call glasses “artificial eyesight.” We don’t call a pacemaker an “artificial heartbeat.” Those are just… medical care. Helpful, life-changing, sometimes life-saving medical care. But with family building, we’ve decided that medical help somehow taints the final product. It’s a special kind of cruelty, and it’s one we rarely examine.
The Grief Hidden in the Adjectives
I can’t talk about this without talking about grief. Because underneath all the “natural” versus “artificial” nonsense is a layer of loss that nobody wants to name. For so many of us, the path to parenthood involves a series of small deaths: the death of the fantasy that you’d conceive on your honeymoon, the death of the idea that your body would just know what to do, the death of the belief that wanting something badly enough makes it happen.
And when you’re already carrying that grief, the language can feel like a fresh wound. Every time someone asks if you’ve thought about trying “naturally”—as if you hadn’t already spent years doing exactly that, as if “naturally” didn’t lead you straight to the door of a fertility clinic—it’s a small reminder that your experience is seen as a lesser one. The question itself implies that you skipped the real way and jumped straight to the backup plan, when the truth is usually the opposite.
There’s a dark humor in it, though. I’ve found myself in conversations where I want to say, “Oh, we did try naturally, but apparently my ovaries are a bit dramatic and needed a full production team.” You learn to laugh because the alternative is crying in the produce aisle, and nobody needs to be the person sobbing into the organic kale.
Rewriting the Script
So what do we do with this language? How do we talk about family building without accidentally assigning value judgments? I don’t have a tidy answer, and honestly, I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I think it starts with noticing. Noticing when you use “natural” as a synonym for “good” or “normal.” Noticing when “artificial” slips out as a way to describe something that feels a little too medical, a little too complicated for polite conversation.
Maybe we start saying “unassisted conception” and “assisted conception,” which at least frames it as a difference in tools rather than a difference in value. Maybe we start telling our kids their origin stories without the loaded adjectives. “We wanted you so much, and we had to get some help from a very smart doctor.” That’s a story of love and determination, not a story of artificiality.
Or maybe we just let the whole binary crumble. Families are built in so many ways—through biology, through law, through sheer stubborn will. The method doesn’t predict the love. The origins don’t dictate the bond. My hope is that eventually, the language catches up to the reality, which is that there’s no single “right” way to become a parent, only a thousand different paths, each with its own heartbreak and its own strange, stubborn beauty.
The Loneliness of the Label
One thing I’ve learned is how isolating these labels can be. When you’re in the thick of treatment, you can feel like you’re living in a parallel universe. Friends announce pregnancies with casual shrugs, and you’re calculating how many injections it took to get to your own positive test. You’re grateful, of course you’re grateful, but there’s a loneliness in knowing that your experience doesn’t fit the standard narrative.
And then, once the baby arrives, the labels don’t disappear. They just go underground. They resurface in the well-meaning questions from strangers: “Does he look like you?” Or in the forms at the pediatrician’s office that ask for family medical history, a question that can be a landmine for families built through donor conception or adoption. The language of “natural” and “artificial” isn’t just an abstract debate; it’s a practical, daily reality that shapes how we see ourselves and how others see us.
I’ve watched friends in donor-conceived families struggle with how to answer those questions, not because they’re ashamed, but because the vocabulary we’ve been given is so inadequate. “Well, he has his donor’s nose but my laugh”—that’s not a sentence that fits on a form. We need a language that makes room for the full complexity of these relationships, not one that forces them into a two-box system.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the term ‘natural conception’ bother some people?
The term implies a hierarchy where unassisted conception is more valid or pure than other paths to parenthood. For those who’ve used fertility treatments, donor conception, surrogacy, or adoption, it can feel dismissive of the intense physical, emotional, and financial labor involved in building their family. It also ignores that many “natural” conceptions involve medical support like ovulation tracking or medication.
What’s a better alternative to ‘artificial insemination’ or ‘artificial reproductive technology’?
Many people prefer terms like “assisted reproduction,” “fertility treatment,” or simply naming the specific procedure (IVF, IUI, etc.). These phrases focus on the medical support involved without suggesting the resulting family is somehow inauthentic or counterfeit.
How can I support a friend going through fertility treatment without using hurtful language?
Listen more than you talk. Avoid asking if they’ve considered “just relaxing” or “trying naturally.” Instead, ask open questions like “How are you feeling about everything?” Follow their lead on the language they use to describe their experience, and don’t offer unsolicited advice about alternative paths unless they explicitly ask for it.
Does the language we use really affect how children in these families feel?
Yes. Research and firsthand accounts from donor-conceived people and adoptees show that language shapes identity and belonging. When we frame certain family-building methods as “less than,” children can internalize that stigma. Honest, neutral language that acknowledges their origins without judgment supports healthier identity development.
At the end of this, I’m left with the uncomfortable truth that language is never just language. It’s a map of what we value, what we fear, and what we still haven’t learned to see clearly. The words “natural” and “artificial” are shortcuts, and like all shortcuts, they miss the scenery. They miss the waiting rooms and the injections and the phone calls with insurance companies and the moment when you finally, finally hear a heartbeat. They miss the whole damn point, which is that family is not a process—it’s a result. And that result deserves a better vocabulary.