Joanna Marshall

I sat in my car outside the fertility clinic, holding a stack of bills that smelled faintly of antiseptic and shattered dreams. I’d just been told that the next round of IVF—the one that might actually result in a tiny human who inherits my anxiety and my husband’s inexplicable love of dad jokes—would cost more than my first year of college. And my insurance company? They’d cover exactly zero dollars. Well, maybe a packet of motivational tissues, if I submitted the right claim form.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already in the muck of it. Maybe you’ve Googled “how to afford IVF without selling a kidney” at 2 a.m., or you’ve spent an hour on hold with a customer service rep named Greg who keeps calling you “Mrs.” even though you’ve corrected him three times. I’m Jenna, and I’ve been there. I’ve cried in parking lots, I’ve deciphered insurance jargon that reads like a ransom note, and I’ve learned that “fertility benefit” usually means a discount on a pregnancy test. Let’s talk about it—honestly, and with the kind of dark humor that keeps us from setting fire to our HSA debit cards.

The Great Insurance Shell Game

First, a hard truth: most health insurance in the U.S. treats fertility like a luxury spa service rather than a medical condition. Got a broken arm? Covered. Need to grow a whole human from scratch because your body decided ovulation was optional? That’s a “lifestyle choice,” apparently. Only 19 states have some form of mandated fertility coverage, and even those laws are full of holes big enough to drive a pharmaceutical rep’s SUV through. If you live in a state like Alabama or Idaho, your policy probably covers fertility treatment about as thoroughly as it covers cryogenic freezing.

What Your Policy Actually Says (vs. What You Hope It Says)

I once spent an entire Sunday reading my benefits booklet, which is roughly the length of War and Peace but with fewer plot twists. Here’s the trick: don’t search for “IVF.” Search for “infertility,” “assisted reproductive technology,” or “ART.” These terms hide in sections about “exclusions” or “limitations,” often next to phrases like “not medically necessary.” My favorite was a policy that covered “diagnosis of infertility” but not treatment—so they’d pay to tell me my ovaries were on strike, but not to actually do anything about it. Cool, thanks.

Look for these specifics: lifetime maximums (often $15,000, which covers about one IVF cycle and a half a vial of hormones), cycle limits (some policies cap at three, which is optimistic), and medication coverage (specialty pharmacy costs can double your out-of-pocket). If you have employer-sponsored insurance, call HR and ask for the summary plan description. Be prepared for them to sound as confused as you are; the person on the phone might think “infertility” is a type of plant.

When Your Employer’s “Family-Friendly” Benefits Are a Lie

I worked for a company that bragged about its “comprehensive family benefits” in every recruiting email. What they meant was six weeks of unpaid maternity leave and a lactation room that was actually a converted supply closet with a dead plant. When I asked about fertility coverage, the benefits coordinator said, “Oh, we don’t have that, but we do offer a discount on adoption legal fees!” As if that’s the same thing. If you’re job-hunting while dealing with infertility, you learn to ask very specific questions during interviews: “Does your medical plan cover intrauterine insemination? What about cryopreservation? Is PGT-A testing considered diagnostic or elective?” You’ll sound unhinged, but you’ll also find out the truth before you’re stuck in a job that gives you a pizza party instead of progesterone.

Advocating Like a Bureaucratic Warrior

You will become intimately familiar with the inside of your insurance company’s phone tree. My advice: document everything. Every call, every name, every reference number. I kept a spreadsheet that would make a forensic accountant weep with joy. When my insurer denied pre-authorization for a saline sonogram because it was “experimental” (it’s been standard since the 1990s), I filed an appeal with three peer-reviewed studies and a letter from my doctor that basically said, “What are you, idiots?” It took two months and three levels of review, but they finally approved it. I celebrated by eating a stale bagel in my kitchen and crying.

If you hit a wall, get your clinic’s financial counselor involved. These people are angels in sensible shoes who know how to code procedures in ways that insurance companies don’t immediately reject. For example, sometimes “luteal phase support” can be billed under a generic endocrine disorder code instead of infertility. Is it a gray area? Maybe. Do I care? Absolutely not.

The Medication Money Pit

Nobody warns you that the drugs can cost more than the procedure itself. My first round of injectables required three medications, each priced like a rare orchid. One was $800 per vial, and I needed four vials. Insurance said it would cover 50%, but only after I met a separate prescription deductible, which was $2,000. So I paid out of pocket until I hit that, and then they covered half, and by then my credit card was smoldering in my wallet. Look into manufacturer discount programs—many drug companies offer income-based assistance or coupons. I used a program from a company called Compassionate Care, which sounds like a hospice for teddy bears but actually saved me $1,200.

Alternative Funding That Doesn’t Involve Bank Robbery

Grants exist. Organizations like Baby Quest Foundation and the Cade Foundation give money to people pursuing fertility treatment, often with applications that require essays, tax returns, and a letter from your doctor. I applied to three and got one for $2,000, which felt like winning the world’s most emotionally complicated lottery. There are also fertility-specific loans through companies like Future Family, but read the fine print—interest rates can be predatory, and nothing says “joyful parenthood” like paying off a 15% APR loan for the next decade.

Some clinics offer shared-risk or refund programs: you pay a lump sum (often $20,000-$30,000) for multiple cycles, and if you don’t take home a baby, you get a partial refund. It’s like gambling, but with more vaginal ultrasounds. Read the contract carefully—what counts as a “live birth”? If you miscarry at 20 weeks, does that void the refund? These are conversations you never thought you’d have, and yet here we are.

When You Have to Make Impossible Choices

I know a woman who skipped her brother’s wedding because she couldn’t afford the travel and a cycle of treatment. I know another who sold her car and biked to work for a year. These aren’t quirky lifestyle choices; they’re the reality of a system that treats reproduction like a luxury good. If you’re in this position, let yourself grieve. Let yourself be furious. Then get pragmatic: can you switch to a job with better benefits, even if it’s a pay cut? (Starbucks, for example, offers $20,000 in fertility benefits for part-time employees.) Can you move to a mandated-coverage state? I’m not saying you should upend your life for a chance at a baby, but I’m also not not saying that.

FAQ: Because You’re Tired and Need Answers Fast

Does my insurance cover IVF at all?

Probably not, but check your policy for “infertility services” or “ART.” If you’re in a mandated state like Massachusetts or Illinois, you may have partial coverage. Call your insurer and ask specifically for the “infertility benefit rider” or “family planning benefit”—the front-line rep may not know, so escalate to a supervisor.

What’s the cheapest way to pay for fertility meds?

Ask your clinic about pharmacy discount programs like ReUnite Rx or Fertility LifeLines. Some meds can be ordered from overseas pharmacies for less, but this is legally gray and your doctor may not approve. Also, check if your plan has a separate “specialty drug” tier—you might have coverage you didn’t realize because it’s buried in a different formulary.

Can I negotiate with my clinic or insurance company?

Yes, aggressively. Ask for a cash-pay discount from the clinic (often 10-20% off if you prepay). For insurance denials, file a written appeal with supporting medical records and a letter of medical necessity. Cite your state’s mandate if one exists. Persistence works—I got a $4,000 procedure covered after three denials simply because I wouldn’t stop calling.

In the end, navigating fertility insurance is a part-time job you never applied for, staffed by people who see you as a claim number. But you’re more than that. You’re someone who’s learning to fight a system that was never designed to help you, and that’s a skill you’ll carry long after this chapter is over. Now go drink some water and maybe scream into a pillow—you’ve earned it.

My fertility journey kicked off like most—vague hope, plus a Pinterest board crammed with nursery themes I was too superstitious to actually save. Somewhere between the ovulation strips and my first round of Clomid, hope got elbowed aside by a gnawing, quiet panic. And that panic had a megaphone: other people’s pregnancies.

I’d scroll Instagram and spot a college roommate cradling a sonogram like she’d just won an Oscar. A cousin would text a photo of a onesie with “Coming Soon” stitched across the belly. Even the woman ahead of me in the Target checkout line seemed to flaunt her bump with a kind of casual cruelty, as if to say, “Look what I managed by accident.” I’d smile, type “Congratulations!” with numb fingers, and then crawl into bed to stare at the ceiling, wondering what was so fundamentally busted inside me that I couldn’t pull off the one trick my body was supposedly built for.

Comparison isn’t just the thief of joy, like the saying goes. When you’re in the infertility trenches, comparison morphs into a full-time job you never applied for—unpaid overtime included, and a boss who keeps demanding to know why your uterus can’t meet its quarterly targets. I turned into a scholar of other people’s timelines. She got pregnant on her first IUI. She’s already on round three of IVF. She had a miscarriage and then a rainbow baby six months later. I’d chart their wins and losses like a deranged statistician, hunting for the pattern that would finally unlock my own future.

The Fertility Olympics: A Sport Nobody Wins

There’s a particular flavor of crazy that comes with comparing pain. You start ranking suffering like it’s a competitive event. Well, at least she has one child already. At least I haven’t had a miscarriage. At least her husband’s sperm count is the issue, not her eggs. You become a judge in the Fertility Olympics, handing out gold medals for the most traumatic experience and silver for the longest time trying. But here’s the darkly funny part: there’s no podium. Just a bunch of women, exhausted and bloated from hormones, glaring at each other across the waiting room of a reproductive endocrinologist’s office.

I remember sitting in that waiting room, clutching a folder of lab results, and sizing up the other women. I’d wonder what their numbers were. FSH, AMH, antral follicle count. I wanted to peek at their charts the way you might sneak a glance at someone’s exam grade. If my numbers were worse, I’d feel a sick little jolt of validation. If they were better, I’d drown in guilt and a fresh wave of despair. A lose-lose game, and I played it every single cycle.

The truth is, infertility is a bone-deep lonely experience that we somehow make communal, but only in the worst ways. We gather in online forums and support groups, but instead of simply holding each other’s pain, we often measure it. We ask, “How long have you been trying?” not out of real curiosity, but to figure out where we rank in the hierarchy of heartbreak. It took me ages to realize that nobody wins when you compare your insides to someone else’s outsides. Especially when those outsides are usually a carefully curated highlight reel of injections, retrievals, and transfers that ended with a living child.

The Instagram Illusion and the Quiet Truths

Social media is a liar, but you already know that. What you might not know is how expertly it lies to people trying to conceive. For every perfectly lit announcement photo with a letterboard and a pair of tiny sneakers, there’s a backstory you don’t see. The three miscarriages before that post. The donor eggs. The surrogate. The second mortgage taken out to afford treatment. The marriage that nearly splintered under the weight of timed intercourse and devastating phone calls.

I learned this the hard way when a friend posted her “miracle baby” story, all soft lighting and grateful captions. I seethed with jealousy until, months later, she confided over wine that she’d had a complete breakdown after her second failed transfer and almost left her husband. None of that made the Instagram cut. I’d been comparing my messy, unvarnished reality to her highlight reel, and it was eating me alive.

So I started doing something that felt radical at the time: I stopped looking. I muted the accounts that made my stomach drop. I skipped the baby shower where I knew I’d spend the whole afternoon pasting on a smile that felt like a mask made of glass. I told my mom, gently, that I couldn’t hear the latest update about my cousin’s pregnancy right now. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy for them. It was that my own grief needed room to breathe without being suffocated by everyone else’s joy.

This wasn’t a one-and-done decision. It was a daily practice of choosing my own sanity over the compulsion to compare. Some days I failed. I’d find myself deep in a Reddit thread, calculating someone else’s due date based on their transfer date, and I’d have to physically exile my phone to another room. But slowly, the grip of comparison loosened. I started to see my journey as mine, not as a defective copy of someone else’s.

The Grief That Nobody Talks About

Here’s where it gets honest: stopping the comparison meant I had to actually feel my own feelings. And that was terrifying. Underneath the jealousy and the obsessive tracking lay a deep, howling grief. Grief for the easy conception I’d always assumed would be mine. Grief for the way sex had become a choreographed medical event. Grief for the person I used to be—the one who could see a pregnancy announcement without feeling like she’d been punched in the throat.

I started seeing a therapist who specialized in infertility, and I said to her, “I feel like I’m drowning, and everyone else is swimming.” She looked at me and said, “A lot of those swimmers are drowning too. They’re just wearing better swimsuits.” I laughed, a real laugh, for the first time in months. It was the kind of dark humor that only people in this club understand. The club nobody wants to join, but once you’re in it, you find some of the bravest, funniest, most resilient people you’ll ever meet.

What Actually Helped (Beyond Wine and Crying in the Shower)

I wish I could say I found a magic formula, but I didn’t. What I found were small, stubborn acts of self-preservation. I started a journal where I wrote down every ugly thought I had, no filter. I gave myself permission to be furious at pregnant strangers and then let the fury pass without judgment. I found a tiny group of women, online and in real life, who understood that sometimes you just need someone to say, “This sucks,” without trying to fix it.

I also started paying attention to the stories that didn’t end with a baby. The women who stopped treatment. The couples who chose a childfree life after years of trying. The ones who found a different kind of peace. Their voices were quieter, less celebrated, but they taught me something vital: my worth was never tethered to my ability to reproduce. It’s a lesson I have to relearn constantly, especially when another friend announces her second or third child while I’m still waiting for my first.

Finding Your Own Timeline in a World Obsessed with Due Dates

One of the hardest parts of infertility is the way it warps time. Everyone else seems to be moving forward, hitting milestones, while you’re stuck in a loop of two-week waits and negative tests. You watch your friends’ children grow from newborns to toddlers to kindergarteners, and you’re still in the same spot, only older and more tired. It’s easy to feel like you’re being left behind, like life is a train you’ve missed.

But I started to realize that timelines are a fiction we invent to make ourselves feel in control. There’s no cosmic schedule. No fertility god checking a watch and tapping a foot. Your journey doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s because it literally can’t. Your body, your circumstances, your specific cocktail of genetics and luck and medical history—it’s all unique. Comparing it to someone else’s is like comparing a thunderstorm to a sunset. They’re both weather, but they’re not the same.

FAQ: The Questions I Get Asked (And the Honest Answers)

How do you deal with pregnancy announcements when you’re still trying?

Honestly? I let myself feel whatever comes up. Jealousy, rage, sadness, numbness—it’s all allowed. I might cry in the bathroom for five minutes, then text a friend who gets it. Then I send a brief, genuine congratulations if I can, or I wait until I’m ready. There’s no rule that says you have to respond immediately. Protect your heart first.

Did you ever consider giving up on fertility treatments?

Every single cycle. Some days the thought of stopping was the only thing that gave me relief. I learned that “giving up” isn’t a failure; it’s a choice to reclaim your life from a process that can consume you. Whether you stop after one round or ten, it’s your decision, and nobody else gets a vote.

What’s the best way to support someone going through infertility?

Don’t offer advice unless they ask. Don’t tell them to “just relax” or share stories about your cousin who adopted and then got pregnant. Just say, “I’m here. This is unfair and hard, and I love you.” Bring them dinner. Remember their due dates if they’ve had losses. Let them be sad without trying to cheer them up. The best support is presence without pressure.

How do you stop the comparison spiral when it starts?

I name it out loud: “I’m comparing again.” Then I physically step away from whatever triggered it—social media, a conversation, my own thoughts. I do something grounding, like holding an ice cube or taking a walk. And I remind myself that someone else’s success doesn’t shrink my chances. It feels that way, but feelings aren’t facts. Sometimes I just have to wait for the wave to pass.

These days, I still catch myself comparing. It’s a reflex, like a knee-jerk response to pain. But now I recognize it faster. I see it for what it is: a desperate grab to make sense of a senseless situation. Infertility is chaos. It doesn’t follow rules or fairness or logic. Trying to find order by measuring yourself against others is like trying to organize a hurricane. You can’t. You just have to find your own shelter and wait it out.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, I see you. I know how heavy it is to carry hope and grief in the same body. And I know it feels like everyone else has a map while you’re wandering in the dark. But your journey is yours. It’s not a failed version of someone else’s. It’s a story that’s still being written, and you’re allowed to write it at your own pace, in your own messy, honest, darkly funny way.

There’s a particular silence that settles in a room when you mention IVF. It’s not the silence of sympathy—though sometimes people try to stuff that in there, awkward and lumpy, like a sweater you didn’t ask for. It’s the silence of classification. The minds in the room are flipping through their mental files, trying to decide where you belong. Natural or artificial? Which box does this baby—this hypothetical, hoped-for, fiercely wanted baby—get shoved into?

I’ve spent years wading through this language, the words people use to describe how families come to be. And if I’m being honest, which I try to be even when it makes me sound like a jerk, the word that sticks in my throat most is “natural.” It’s draped over everything from childbirth to deodorant, and in the context of family building, it does something quietly vicious: it draws a line between the real and the fake, the valid and the somehow lesser.

What We Mean When We Say “Natural”

Let’s be clear: when someone says a pregnancy was “natural,” they usually mean it involved sex between two people who own the requisite gametes, no doctors, no needles, no petri dishes winking under lab lights. It’s meant to sound pure, unmeddled-with, the way nature intended. But nature, if we’re being truthful, is a complete asshole a lot of the time. It gives us hurricanes and wisdom teeth and a reproductive system that, for so many of us, just shrugs and says, “Nah, not today.”

The word “natural” carries a moral weight it hasn’t earned. It implies that there’s a right way to make a family, and by extension, a wrong way. I’ve felt that weight in conversations where I’ve mentioned our path—the injections, the retrievals, the embryos graded like high school report cards. People don’t always say it out loud, but you can see the question forming: But is it really yours? As if love is measured in the number of candles lit during conception.

The “Artificial” Label and Its Baggage

Then there’s the other side: “artificial.” The word itself sounds like something manufactured in a factory, stamped out on an assembly line. Artificial sweetener. Artificial turf. Artificial insemination. It conjures images of cold metal instruments and fluorescent lights, a process stripped of intimacy or desire. And look, I’ve been in those rooms. They are, in fact, cold and fluorescent. But so is a hospital delivery room. So is the NICU. So is the back seat of a Honda Civic, depending on your choices.

The problem with “artificial” isn’t that it’s inaccurate—IVF does involve technology, obviously—but that it’s loaded with judgment. It suggests a departure from something essential, something human. It erases the aching humanity of the whole endeavor: the hope that curdles into despair and back again, the bruises on your stomach from progesterone shots, the way you hold your partner’s hand in a waiting room at 6 a.m. while pretending you’re not terrified. None of that feels artificial. It feels like the rawest, most unvarnished thing I’ve ever done.

The Quiet Hierarchy of Conception Stories

There’s a hierarchy we don’t talk about, a pecking order of how babies are made. At the top, you’ve got the surprise pregnancy—the “we weren’t even trying!” story, told with a breezy laugh that makes you want to throw a spoon at the wall. Then comes the planned pregnancy that happened quickly, a neat little miracle that fits into a three-month window. Below that, somewhere in the murky middle, are the fertility treatments: Clomid, IUI, and then, at the very bottom, IVF with its needles and debt and the faint whiff of laboratory desperation.

Adoption and surrogacy occupy their own strange corners of this hierarchy, often praised for their altruism but still whispered about as “not the same.” I’ve heard people say, with the best intentions, “At least you know you can always adopt!” as if it’s a consolation prize, a backup plan for when your body fails you. The language we use for these paths is a minefield. “Giving up” a baby versus “making an adoption plan.” “Biological mother” versus “real mother.” Every word is a choice, and every choice tells a story about who we think counts.

Rewriting the Script

I’m not naive enough to think we can just swap out vocabulary and fix the problem. But language shapes how we think, and how we think shapes how we treat people. When we call one path “natural,” we’re not just describing a biological process—we’re assigning value. We’re telling the woman who went through three egg retrievals that her motherhood is somehow less organic, less instinctive, less real.

What would happen if we dropped the binary altogether? If we talked about “assisted” conception without the implied asterisk? If we recognized that every family is built through some combination of biology, luck, science, stubbornness, and whatever grace we can scrape together? Because here’s the thing: the love you feel for a child doesn’t come with a provenance label. It doesn’t matter if the embryo was made in a lab or a bedroom or a back alley. It just arrives, huge and terrifying and completely indifferent to your plans.

The Body’s Betrayal and Its Dark Humor

There’s a dark humor in infertility that only the initiated understand. It’s the laugh you force out when someone tells you to “just relax” and you imagine relaxing your way into a six-figure medical debt. It’s the absurdity of injecting yourself with hormones that make you simultaneously weepy and homicidal, then going to work like everything’s normal. It’s the way you start to see your body as a defective machine, a traitor that won’t do the one thing it was supposedly designed for.

I’ve made jokes about my ovaries that would make a sailor blush. I’ve referred to our embryos as “the frozen assets” and our fertility clinic as “the world’s most expensive lottery.” This humor isn’t a deflection—it’s a survival mechanism. It’s a way of reclaiming a process that so often makes you feel powerless. If I can laugh at the absurdity of it all, then maybe it hasn’t broken me completely.

The Messy Middle

I don’t have a tidy solution. I don’t have a new set of words that will make everything fair and kind. What I have is a deep exhaustion with the way we talk about this, and a stubborn belief that we can do better. When I hear someone describe their conception story as “natural,” I don’t correct them—I’m not a monster—but I notice the tiny flinch it creates in my chest. It’s the same flinch I feel when someone calls a C-section “not a real birth” or formula feeding “the easy way out.” These words build walls, and I’ve spent enough of my life on the wrong side of them.

Maybe the answer is to get specific. Instead of “natural,” say “unassisted” or “spontaneous.” Instead of “artificial,” say “medically assisted” or just “IVF” or “IUI” or whatever acronym you’ve come to loathe. But even that feels like a bandage on a wound that needs stitches. The real shift has to happen deeper, in the way we think about what makes a family real. And spoiler: it’s not the method of conception. It’s the showing up, the middle-of-the-night feedings, the thousand small decisions that say I choose you, over and over.

FAQ

Why does the word “natural” bother people who used fertility treatments?

Because “natural” implies that other ways of conceiving are unnatural, which quickly slides into judgments about what’s normal, real, or valid. For someone who has endured IVF, IUI, or donor conception, hearing a pregnancy described as “natural” can feel like a quiet dismissal of their own experience, as if their child’s origin story is somehow lesser or artificial in a bad way.

Isn’t “artificial” just a factual description of medically assisted reproduction?

Technically, yes—it involves technology that doesn’t exist in a purely biological context. But words carry emotional weight. “Artificial” often connotes something fake or inferior, like artificial flavoring versus the real thing. When applied to family building, it can make people feel like their efforts, their love, and their children are being diminished. Most prefer terms like “assisted reproduction” or simply the specific procedure name.

How can I talk about family building without offending someone?

The safest approach is to be neutral and specific. If you don’t know someone’s story, avoid broad labels like “natural birth” or “real mother.” Say “vaginal birth” if you mean that, or “birth parent” if you’re discussing biology. When in doubt, ask people what language they prefer—and then actually use it. Most people just want their experience to be acknowledged without comparison or hierarchy.

What if I’m the one who feels hurt by these terms? How do I cope?

First, know that your feelings are valid. The language around conception and parenting can be deeply isolating. It helps to find a community—online or in-person—of people who’ve walked a similar path. Sometimes, dark humor and venting to someone who gets it is the best medicine. You don’t have to educate every person who uses the wrong word, but you’re allowed to protect your own peace and correct language that stings, especially in close relationships.

In the end, I think about the child we’re trying to bring into this mess. I don’t want them to grow up hearing that their existence was “artificial” or that their beginning was anything less than extraordinary. I want them to know that they were wanted with a ferocity that defied biology, that we fought for them in fluorescent rooms with needles and hope and a dark, desperate humor. If that’s not natural, I don’t know what is.

I didn’t set out to become a walking thesaurus for other people’s discomfort. But when your path to parenthood involves a spreadsheet of medical codes, a refrigerated delivery of someone else’s gametes, and a clinic where the magazines in the waiting room are from 2014, you start noticing the words. Specifically, the ones people use to build a fence between “real” families and whatever Frankenstein’s monster they assume is happening in my uterus.

I am, in the parlance of our times, building my family “artificially.” And my God, the language is a disaster.

The Nature Documentary of My Ovaries

Let’s start with “natural.” It’s everywhere. “Are you going to try naturally first?” “At least you have one natural child.” “It’s so beautiful when it happens naturally.” I’ve started imagining “natural” conception as a little David Attenborough segment inside my body. The sperm, a determined explorer, navigating the treacherous cervical mucus while I narrate in a hushed British whisper: “Here, in the fallopian savanna, the egg awaits her suitor. A dance as old as time itself.” Meanwhile, my “artificial” conception involves a lab tech named Steve, a pipette, and a fluorescent light that makes everyone look like a corpse.

The word “natural” has become a stealth weapon. It’s a gold star you can stick on someone’s sex life, a way of saying “your family was made with wholesome, organic, free-range love, not in a petri dish by someone who definitely didn’t wash their hands long enough.” It implies a hierarchy. Natural children are artisanally crafted; artificial ones are mass-produced. I’m half-expecting someone to ask if my future kid will have a “Made in a Lab” sticker on their forehead.

But here’s the thing: my body is not a national park. It’s a malfunctioning ecosystem. Calling my infertility journey “unnatural” is like calling a heart bypass “unnatural.” Sure, ideally my arteries would cooperate, but they’re staging a revolt, so now I have a piece of plastic in my chest and I’m not dead. Is that artificial? Yes. Is it a problem? Only if you think dying “naturally” is somehow more virtuous.

The Donor Sperm Elephant in the Room

Then we get to the donor conversation. I’ve used donor sperm. Saying that sentence still makes me feel like I’m admitting to a weird hobby. “Hi, I’m Jenna, and I enjoy long walks on the beach and purchasing genetic material from a stranger whose baby photo looked vaguely like my husband.”

People don’t know what to call this. The donor is not the “real” father. My husband, the man who will teach this child to ride a bike and explain why we don’t microwave metal, is the real father. But language fails us. I’ve heard “biological father,” “genetic father,” and my personal favorite, the whispered “you know… the actual father.” No, Karen, I don’t know. The actual father is the one who will be projectile-vomited on at 3 a.m. The actual father is the one signing permission slips and having the sex talk. The other guy ejaculated into a cup for cash in college. These are not the same job description.

I’ve started referring to the donor as “the genetic underwriter.” It sounds like a corporate sponsor, which honestly feels accurate. “This child was brought to you by Donor #4187 and a 20% off coupon at the sperm bank.” Dark? Yes. Funny? Also yes. It’s the only way I can survive the absurdity. Because if I can’t laugh about the fact that my child’s genetic material arrived in a tank of liquid nitrogen called a “Dewar,” what am I even doing?

The IVF Lexicon of Doom

In vitro fertilization itself comes with a glossary that sounds like a dystopian sci-fi novel. “Egg retrieval,” for instance. It sounds so gentle, like I’m popping down to the market for a carton of free-range ovum. In reality, it’s a procedure where a very long needle goes through your vaginal wall while you’re under twilight sedation, and you wake up feeling like you’ve been punched in the soul by a tiny, vengeful fist.

Then there’s “embryo transfer.” This term has all the romance of a bank transaction. “We’ll just transfer the funds.” Except the funds are a microscopic clump of cells that might become a human, and the bank is my uterus, and the teller is a doctor who’s trying to make small talk about the weather while a catheter threads through my cervix. “Any fun weekend plans?” she asks, as I lie there with my feet in stirrups, praying to a God I’m not sure I believe in that this one sticks.

And let’s not forget “chemical pregnancy.” What a hideous phrase. It sounds like the pregnancy was conducted in a beaker and then evaporated. In reality, it’s a very early miscarriage—a positive test, a surge of hope, then a negative test and a period that feels like a personal failure. Calling it “chemical” strips it of any humanity. It’s as if the medical establishment decided that if a pregnancy doesn’t last long enough to be seen on an ultrasound, it doesn’t count as a real loss. But the grief is real. The grief is so, so real.

Reclaiming the Narrative, One Snarky Comment at a Time

So what do we do with this linguistic dumpster fire? I’ve decided to stop letting other people define my family’s origin story. If “natural” means a blissful, unassisted conception in a field of wildflowers, then fine, my family is “artificial.” We’re plastic. We’re synthetic. We’re the polyester of procreation. And you know what? Polyester doesn’t wrinkle. Polyester survives the washing machine. Polyester is durable as hell.

I’m also learning to correct people with a smile that’s just sharp enough to draw blood. When someone asks if I’ll “try naturally,” I say, “Well, my natural state is infertility, so we’re going with science.” When they refer to my future child as “not fully mine” because of the donor, I ask them if they’d like to explain that to the kid, because I’ll happily film it for the family Christmas card.

The truth is, all family building is a little bit artificial. We’re all constructing something out of hope and chaos and the occasional fertility smoothie recipe from a stranger on the internet. The “natural” label is just a way to make some people feel like they earned it, when really, we’re all just rolling the dice and praying they don’t come up snake eyes. My dice just happen to be frozen.

The FAQ I Never Wanted to Write

Is “natural” conception really better than “artificial” methods?

No. This is a false binary. “Natural” is a word we use to describe a process that worked without intervention, not a moral judgment. Conception via IVF or IUI is just conception with extra steps—and a lot more paperwork. The outcome is the same: a baby. The method doesn’t determine the love, the parenting, or the quality of the human being. If it did, we’d have to start judging people based on whether they were conceived on a waterbed, and I don’t think anyone wants that.

How do I talk to my child about being donor-conceived?

Early, often, and without shame. Use clear, age-appropriate language. “We needed a special kind of seed to help you grow, and a very kind person shared theirs.” Don’t make it a secret, because secrets imply shame. Frame it as a normal, beautiful part of their story. And if you need to, practice on the cat first. The cat won’t judge your phrasing.

Why do people react so weirdly to “artificial” family building?

Because it challenges the fairy tale. We’re raised on a narrative of love, marriage, baby carriage. When the carriage requires a medical team and a financial plan that rivals a small country’s GDP, it disrupts the illusion of effortlessness. People don’t know how to hold space for that complexity, so they fall back on clunky language and invasive questions. It’s not malice, usually—it’s ignorance wrapped in a bow of good intentions. But that doesn’t mean you have to accept it gracefully. A little awkward silence in response to a dumb question can be a powerful teacher.

Is it okay to laugh about infertility?

For me, absolutely. Dark humor is my survival mechanism. If I can’t joke about the absurdity of paying $1,000 for a vial of sperm that might not even thaw correctly, I’ll just cry forever. But humor is personal. What feels cathartic to me might feel hurtful to someone else. The key is to laugh at the system, the absurdity, the language—not at the pain itself. And always, always read the room. A fertility clinic waiting room is not the place for your stand-up routine.

I’ve spent a lot of time in those waiting rooms. They’re a purgatory of bad magazines and worse coffee. Everyone is pretending to read, but really we’re all just cataloging each other’s bodies, wondering who’s pregnant, who’s failed, who’s about to cry. The language of this world is sterile—literally and figuratively. But the people in it are anything but. We’re a secret society of hope-hoarders, clutching our lucky socks and our progesterone suppositories, speaking in codes: beta, blastocyst, BFN.

Maybe that’s the real problem with the “natural” versus “artificial” debate. It erases the humanity of the process. It reduces a profound, messy, often heartbreaking journey to a binary that exists only in the minds of people who’ve never had to think about it. My family is not a thought experiment. It’s not a rhetorical device. It’s my life, built one injection, one ultrasound, one panic attack at a time.

I remember the first time I held a positive pregnancy test that came from a transfer. I didn’t feel “natural” or “artificial.” I felt terror and joy and the overwhelming urge to pee on seventeen more sticks just to be sure. The language didn’t matter. The result did. That little pink line was the most real thing I’d ever seen, and no amount of semantic gymnastics could change that.

If I could wave a magic wand—or better yet, a very expensive fertility wand covered in ultrasound gel—I’d erase the word “natural” from the family-building conversation. I’d replace it with “intentional.” Because that’s what this is. An intentional, deliberate, fiercely wanted creation. There’s nothing artificial about that. It’s the most human thing in the world.

So call it what you want. Call it a test-tube baby, a science experiment, a miracle of modern medicine. I call it my kid. And if you ask whether they were “natural,” I’ll probably just smile and say, “No, they’re supernatural.” Because honestly, after everything it took to get them here, that feels about right.

There’s a particular brand of quiet devastation that comes wrapped in a compliment. Someone, usually at a baby shower I was guilted into attending, will tilt their head, gesture at my daughter, and say, “She’s just so natural.” The word hangs in the air between us, a little grenade of good intentions. What they mean, of course, is that she’s beautiful, unposed, perhaps currently smearing avocado into her hair with the kind of feral joy only a toddler can muster. But what I hear is a taxonomy. A sorting. A line drawn in the sandbox of procreation.

I am Jenna Luisa Ferrer, and my family tree is a Frankenstein’s monster of love, science, and a frankly shocking amount of paperwork. My daughter was conceived via IVF, using donor eggs, after my own ovaries decided to retire early, presumably to pursue a life of leisure I was not invited to. Before her, there were miscarriages, there were timed injections in gas station bathrooms, there was a lot of weeping into overpriced fertility smoothies. And through it all, there was the language. The relentless, maddening, utterly absurd language of “natural” versus “artificial” family building.

The Ghost in the Machine of My Womb

Let’s start with the big one: “natural conception.” The phrase is a linguistic magic trick. It conjures images of a candlelit bedroom, a bottle of organic wine, two people dissolving into a puddle of pure, unmediated biological destiny. No spreadsheets, no syringes, no embryologists with impressive eyebrows peering through a microscope. It sounds so simple, so inevitable. It’s a story we tell ourselves about how life is supposed to begin.

But here’s the darkly funny part: for so many of us, the “natural” way was a complete and utter failure. My body, that supposed temple of earthy womanhood, was less a sacred birthing vessel and more a hostile work environment for embryos. My husband’s sperm, bless their little determined tails, were fine. The problem was my eggs, which apparently aged in dog years. So, we turned to the “artificial.” We outsourced the genetic material to a generous stranger, created life in a petri dish, and I carried that life in my body, fed it with my blood, birthed it through my own immense, screaming effort. Tell me again which part of that was artificial. Was it the love? The pain? The stretch marks that now map my abdomen like a topographic chart of a war I won?

The word “artificial” suggests something fake, a cheap imitation. Fake flowers. Artificial sweetener with its cloying, chemical aftertaste. Yet the child who throws her entire body weight against my shins when I try to drink a cup of coffee is the most real thing I have ever experienced. Her tantrums are not synthetic. The way she says “Mama” is not a simulation. The language we use to describe her origin is a clumsy, violent shorthand that erases the entire sweaty, miraculous reality of her existence.

The “Own” Goal of Genetic Narcissism

Then we get to the qualifiers. “Your own child.” A phrase most often deployed by people who have never had to confront the concept of genetic material that isn’t theirs. I was once asked, by a well-meaning relative, if I was worried I wouldn’t love a baby who wasn’t “my own.” I smiled, the kind of smile that stretches your lips over your teeth in a way that could be mistaken for warmth but is actually a survival mechanism to prevent you from biting someone. I thought about the embryo transfer, the little flash of light on the ultrasound, the sheer, desperate hope I felt. Was that hope not mine? Was the body I built for her, cell by cell, calcium theft and all, not my own?

This obsession with genetic ownership is a special kind of madness. We have created a hierarchy of parental love, with “biological” at the top, a rung below it for “adoptive,” and a confusing, misty middle ground for people like me who are gestational carriers but not genetic sources. It’s a system designed to make some families feel like they are wearing a counterfeit label. I remember sitting in a support group, surrounded by women who were all grappling with donor conception, and one woman whispered, “I feel like a photocopy of a mother.” The room let out a collective, pained exhale. We had all felt it. That insidious fear that our love was a knock-off, a synthetic fiber in a world that demands pure silk.

The Fertility Industrial Complex and Its Ugly Jargon

It’s not just the laypeople with their casual cruelty. The medical machine itself speaks in a dialect of dehumanization. I was often referred to as a “poor responder.” Not a woman with a name and a history and a desperate, aching heart, but a malfunctioning machine that didn’t react properly to the input of drugs. My uterus was “hostile,” my eggs were “geriatric,” my cervical mucus was, apparently, “scant.” I’ve been called many things in my life, but “scant” is a new low. You start to feel like a piece of faulty equipment being discussed by weary mechanics.

And then there are the acronyms. TTC, ART, IVF, ICSI, DE, PGS. A whole alphabet soup of grief. You find yourself living in a world where a “chemical pregnancy” is a thing, a phrase so brutally clinical it reduces the loss of a brief, bright hope to a lab error. “Spontaneous abortion” is another gem—a term that sounds like a fetus just decided to up and quit on a whim. “Oh, I’m just going to spontaneously abort this one. Not feeling it.” The language is sterilized, stripped of emotion, precisely because the emotions are too big. If we called a miscarriage what it feels like—a soul-shattering, body-betraying cataclysm—the doctors would never get through their afternoon rounds.

When “Trying” Becomes a Competitive Sport

The phrase “just relax, and it will happen naturally” deserves its own circle of hell. It is a piece of advice so breathtakingly stupid it should be considered a form of assault. It implies that infertility is a failure of chill, a personal shortcoming in the zen department. It ignores the blocked tubes, the absent sperm, the genetic translocations, the entire brutal, physical reality of what’s actually going on. I was once told this by a woman who got pregnant on her honeymoon by looking at her husband. She meant well. They always do. But the subtext is a poison: your body is failing because your mind is wrong. You are not enough of a natural woman.

And on the flip side, there’s the bizarre sanctification of suffering for the “artificial” route. “You must want it so much to go through all that.” As if the “natural” parents don’t want it. As if desire is measured in needle sticks and transvaginal ultrasounds. It creates a perverse competition where the more you suffer, the more valid your claim to the child. I have caught myself doing it, listing my reproductive trauma like a resume: one surgery, three IUIs, two miscarriages, one egg donor, and a partridge in a pear tree. Look at my credentials! Validate my motherhood! It’s a sickness. The child is not a trophy you win for enduring the most pain.

Rewriting the Script

So what do we do with this dumpster fire of a lexicon? I’ve started to become a linguistic vigilante, one awkward conversation at a time. When someone asks if my daughter is “my own,” I now say, “She is the product of a massive collaborative art project involving a wonderful woman in California, a brilliant doctor in New York, and my exceptionally hospitable uterus.” It usually shuts them up. Or it opens a door. Sometimes, a woman’s eyes will flicker with recognition, and she’ll lean in and whisper, “We used donor sperm.” A secret sisterhood of the “artificial.”

We need new words, or maybe we need to reclaim the old ones. What is more “natural” than a species doing whatever it takes to survive and reproduce? Crows use tools. Bees build complex, geometric cities. I used a catheter and a freezer. It’s all just biology with different levels of assistance. My daughter is not a science experiment; she is a human girl who loves blueberries and has a terrifyingly accurate dinosaur roar. Her origin story is not a shameful secret to be coded in hushed, clinical terms. It is a story of persistence, of technology, of a profound act of faith and community.

The darkness in this is real, and I will not sanitize it. The grief of not having a genetic connection can hit me at odd moments—seeing a father’s eyes in a child’s face, a mother’s smile. There is a specific, lonely mourning for a biological link that will never exist. But that grief is not the whole story. It sits next to the absurd, cosmic joy of it all. I didn’t “get over” infertility by having a baby; I just added a new, louder set of demands to my existing pile of existential dread. The language needs to hold both. The “natural” and the “artificial” are not opposites; they are dance partners in a very strange, chaotic ballet, and someone always ends up stepping on someone else’s foot.

Ultimately, the label on the family-building tin can is irrelevant. What matters is the content, the messy, screaming, hilarious, mundane reality inside the house. I am not an artificial mother. I am just a mother, covered in Play-Doh and existential exhaustion, which is, I suspect, the most natural state of all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t it just semantics? Why get so worked up over words?

Because language shapes reality. When we call one form of conception “natural,” we implicitly label other forms as “unnatural.” For a child born via donor or IVF, that framing can plant a seed of otherness from day one. It’s not about being politically correct; it’s about dismantling a hierarchy that puts pain and secrecy on certain families. Words are the first bricks in the house of identity you build for a child, and I’d rather not start with faulty materials.

What should I say instead of “natural” when I mean a pregnancy happened without medical assistance?

I’m a fan of saying exactly what you mean, which is usually just “conceived without ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology)” if the distinction is medically necessary. In casual conversation, you could just say “We didn’t need a doctor’s help.” But honestly, ask yourself why you need to know. If you’re just making small talk, the conception method is deeply personal. A better question is almost always, “How are you feeling?” or just, “Congratulations.” Focus on the human in front of you, not the mechanics of how they got there.

I used donor eggs/sperm and I still struggle with the feeling that my child isn’t fully “mine.” Does that feeling ever go away?

It morphs. At least it did for me. The fear that you’re a “photocopy mother” is a ghost that lives in the room with you for a while. It fades when your child is screaming because you cut their toast wrong, and you realize no amount of shared DNA would make that moment any more or less parenting. It pops back up on Mother’s Day or during genetics units in school. But the lived, daily love—the thousand little rituals and memories you forge—eventually becomes a louder, more permanent story than the biological one. Grief for a genetic link can coexist with complete, ferocious, undeniable knowledge that this child is yours. You aren’t a copy. You are the original, primary, one-and-only mother of this specific, messy human.

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.

There’s a particular silence that settles in a room when someone asks if my daughter was a “natural” pregnancy. It’s the same quiet that lives inside a Petri dish before sperm meets egg. The same held breath of a dozen well-meaning relatives at a baby shower, praying you won’t say something that stains the pastel tablecloth.

I usually take a sip of my drink—something cheap and bubbly, because fertility treatments drained my bank account, not my taste for irony—and I smile. “Oh, she was very natural,” I say. “She cried, she pooped, she kept me up for six months straight. The conception, though? That was a team sport involving an embryologist named Karen and a catheter that cost more than my first car.”

The word “natural” has become a grenade in the world of family building. We lob it around like we’re playing hot potato with a live round, and somebody always ends up bleeding. I’ve been on the receiving end enough times to know the shrapnel is real. It’s time we talked about what this language does, who it hurts, and why I’d rather describe my reproductive journey with the clinical accuracy it deserves—or at least with a joke dark enough to make my therapist wince.

The Semantics of Shame

Let’s strip this down to the gristle. When someone asks if a baby was conceived “naturally,” they’re not inquiring whether the act took place in a yurt with ambient whale sounds. They’re drawing a line between the holy and the profane. The sacred union of two bodies in a bed, and the cold, sterile world of laboratories, needles, and spreadsheets tracking follicle growth. One is a gift; the other, a purchase order.

I remember sitting in a clinic waiting room, flipping through a magazine that had an article titled “Embracing Your Natural Fertility.” It recommended yams, meditation, and visualizing my womb as a “warm, welcoming cave.” Meanwhile, I was there because my fallopian tubes had the navigational skills of a drunk GPS. No amount of yam-visualization was going to fix that. The word “natural” in that context felt like a slap—a reminder that my body had failed the most basic, cavewoman task in the book.

The opposite of “natural” is, of course, “artificial.” And who wants to be told their child is artificial? It conjures images of synthetic turf, sweetener packets, a doll that blinks when you tilt it. My daughter is not a science experiment. She is a hurricane of glitter and rage who once bit a pediatrician. That’s as real as it gets. Yet the language persists, forcing us into a binary where one path is virtuous and the other is an expensive, slightly embarrassing backup plan.

The Cult of the “Real” Mother

There’s a hierarchy buried in this vocabulary, and it’s not subtle. A “natural” mother is often coded as more authentic, more connected to her child, more tapped into some primal maternal force. An “artificial” mother—by which we mean someone who used IVF, donor eggs, surrogacy, or adoption—is constantly having to prove she belongs at the playground. We’re the ones who get the tilted-head sympathy, the “I could never love a child that wasn’t mine” comments, the unsolicited advice about how stress was probably the reason we couldn’t conceive in the first place.

I’ve been told, more than once, that my C-section wasn’t a “real” birth. That my IVF baby was a “test-tube baby,” as if she were stored in a beaker next to the baking soda volcano. The language of “natural” bleeds into every corner of parenthood, creating a caste system where some of us are always scrambling for legitimacy. I didn’t push her out of my vagina, and I didn’t conceive her on a bed of rose petals. Does that mean my stretch marks are counterfeit? My sleepless nights a sham?

The Clinical Poetry of ART

If we must have a vocabulary for family building, let’s at least use one that doesn’t sound like a judgment from a 1950s health class. Assisted Reproductive Technology, or ART, is the umbrella term for treatments like IVF, IUI, and surrogacy. The acronym alone is a small rebellion—reframing the process as an art form, not a cold industrial act. There’s a tenderness in that word if you squint: the art of making a family when the usual brushes don’t work.

I’ve started saying “medically conceived” when I need to be precise. It’s accurate without being loaded. My daughter was medically conceived. She was also conceived with a lot of hope, a lot of tears, and a staggering amount of vaginal suppositories that no one warned me about. The medicine was just the vehicle. The love—clichéd as it sounds—was the engine.

The irony is that “natural” conception is often anything but. It’s a chaos of timing, mucus, and praying your partner’s sperm aren’t lazy. It’s miscarriages and chemical pregnancies and months of staring at a single pink line until your eyes cross. There’s nothing pure about it. It’s messy, biological, and frequently heartbreaking. Yet we reserve our awe for the couple who “just looked at each other and got pregnant,” while the IVF warrior who injected herself with hormones for six months is treated like she hacked the system.

The Language We Deserve

So what do we say instead? I’m not proposing a sterile, politically correct script that sucks all the humanity out of the room. I’m proposing honesty. If you want to ask how someone built their family, try: “What was your journey to parenthood like?” That question opens a door instead of building a wall. It allows for stories about adoption, surrogacy, donor conception, or that one time you got drunk at a wedding and woke up pregnant. All of it is valid. All of it is real.

For those of us who’ve been through the medical gauntlet, we might choose to reclaim words that were used against us. I call my daughter my little lab rat sometimes, but it’s my joke to make. It’s the dark humor of the trenches—a way of saying, “I know what they think, and I don’t care.” When another IVF mom laughs at my “embryo on ice” punchline, it’s recognition. It’s a club none of us wanted to join, but damn, the snacks at the meetings are good.

The Grief Trapped in “Natural”

There’s a grief that comes with infertility that the word “natural” constantly picks at. It’s the grief of the life you thought you’d have—the surprise pregnancy announcement, the romantic story of “we just knew,” the smug certainty that your body would do what bodies have done for millennia. When you lose that, you lose a narrative. You’re thrust into a world of probabilities, statistics, and decisions that feel more like a business negotiation than a miracle.

I grieved the loss of spontaneity. I grieved the idea that my husband and I could create life through an act of love, rather than an act of scheduling and financial planning. I grieved the fact that my daughter’s origin story would include a trigger shot and a transvaginal ultrasound wand that had seen more action than most Tinder dates. But here’s the thing: grief and joy can share a bunk bed. They’re cramped and uncomfortable, but they learn to live together. My daughter’s existence is the joy. The grief is just the shadow it casts.

When someone uses “natural” as a dividing line, they’re not just being careless with language. They’re poking a wound that, for many of us, never fully heals. It’s a reminder of what we couldn’t have, even if we’re now holding exactly what we wanted. I don’t need pity. I just need people to stop acting like my child was assembled in a factory while theirs was hand-knit by angels.

FAQ: Because You’re Probably Still Wondering

After years of fielding questions that range from curious to catastrophically rude, I’ve compiled the greatest hits. Here’s what I wish I could staple to every baby shower invitation.

Is an IVF baby different from a “natural” baby?

Only in the sense that my daughter came with a detailed embryo report and a photo of herself as a five-day-old blastocyst. She still throws tantrums in the cereal aisle, so I’d say the outcomes are pretty identical.

Why does the word “natural” bother infertility communities so much?

Because it implies a moral hierarchy where there is none. It suggests that conception without medical help is superior, purer, or more wanted. When you’ve fought for every cell of your child’s existence, that implication feels like a dismissal of your entire battle.

What should I say instead of “natural conception”?

Try “unassisted conception” or “spontaneous conception” if you need a clinical term. Or just ask how someone’s family came to be. The story is usually more interesting than a label anyway.

Isn’t “artificial” just the accurate opposite of “natural”?

Language isn’t neutral. “Artificial” carries connotations of fake, inferior, or imitation. If you wouldn’t call a heart bypass patient “artificially alive,” maybe don’t call my kid artificially conceived.

Rewriting the Script

I’m not naive enough to think we can erase “natural” from the fertility conversation overnight. It’s too deeply embedded in how we talk about bodies, birth, and worth. But we can start by noticing when we use it, and asking ourselves what we’re really trying to say. Are we celebrating a pregnancy, or are we quietly ranking it? Are we making conversation, or are we drawing a circle that leaves some parents outside?

My daughter will grow up knowing her story. It won’t be a secret whispered in hallways; it’ll be a fact as ordinary as her eye color. I plan to tell her that she was wanted so fiercely that we moved mountains—and by mountains, I mean insurance paperwork, hormone injections, and a single embryo that decided to stick around. That’s not artificial. That’s not unnatural. That’s just love with a medical co-pay.

So the next time someone asks if my child was a “natural” conception, I might just hand them a speculum and tell them to figure it out themselves. Or I’ll do what I always do: crack a joke, shift the conversation, and silently add their name to the list of people who need a vocabulary lesson. Because if my daughter is anything, she’s living proof that the best things in life don’t always start the way we expected. Sometimes they start in a lab, under a microscope, with a stranger named Karen who deserves a raise.

There’s a specific brand of absurdity that hits you while sitting in a fertility clinic waiting room, flipping through a magazine. You know the photo: a dewy, sun-drenched pregnant woman cradling a mason jar filled with something herbal. The caption reads, “Embrace Your Natural Fertility Journey.” I glance down at my own lap, where a pharmacy bag crinkles under the weight of pre-filled syringes. I want to laugh. But I’m too tired. And honestly? The laugh would probably come out as a bark.

I’m Jenna, and I’ve spent a strange number of years chewing on the words “natural” and “artificial.” Not in a philosophy seminar kind of way. More like a “my body is currently being wrangled by science, hope, and a staggering amount of credit card debt” kind of way. The language we use to talk about building a family is a minefield. I’ve stepped on most of the explosives.

The Myth of the “Natural” Pedestal

Let’s start with the obvious villain: the word “natural.” It gets draped over unassisted conception like a hand-knit organic cotton baby blanket. Whispered in yoga classes. Plastered on book covers that promise to help you “get in tune with your cycle.” Every time I hear it, a small, petty part of me wants to ask, “Oh, so is my child going to be… unnatural? Like a plastic fern?”

The problem isn’t that the word exists. It’s that it’s been weaponized into a hierarchy. A “natural” conception gets cast as the pure, untainted ideal. Everything else—IUI, IVF, donor eggs, surrogacy, adoption—lands in a shadowy category we might as well call “Frankenstein’s Nursery.” I’ve been on the receiving end of that look. The one that flickers with pity and a tiny, unspoken relief that their family happened the “right” way. You can feel the dangling “but” when someone says, “Wow, science can do amazing things.” They really mean, “Wow, you had to resort to that.”

And here’s the darkly funny part: what even counts as natural? My great-grandmother gave birth in a field in the Philippines with nothing but a midwife and sheer grit. That’s natural. Me? I’m a woman who injected herself with hormones derived from the urine of post-menopausal nuns (okay, maybe not nuns, but the origin story of gonadotropins is genuinely unhinged). I’ve had my eggs sucked out by a needle guided by an ultrasound wand while I was blissfully knocked out. There is nothing about my conception story that involves a mason jar—unless you count the one I used to collect my own pee for ovulation tests. That was a lot of pee.

The Artificial Heart of the Matter

Then there’s the flip side: “artificial.” It’s the word that lodges in my throat like a dry pill. Artificial insemination. Artificial reproductive technology. The term sounds sterile, metallic, a little bit dystopian. It conjures test tubes and steel tables and scientists who have never held a baby. Nobody sends you a card that reads, “Congratulations on your artificial bundle of joy!”

But here’s what I’ve learned, parked in those waiting rooms, surrounded by other women with pharmacy bags and clenched jaws: the so-called artificial part is just the ignition. The rest—the swollen ankles, the midnight dread, the fierce, primal love that grabs you by the throat—is as real as it gets. Calling IVF “artificial” misses the point so entirely it almost circles back to being funny. My son’s first cry wasn’t synthesized. The placenta I delivered wasn’t made of silicone. It was messy and bloody and so overwhelmingly animal that I felt like a mammal for the first time in my life.

I’ve started to think of the word “artificial” the way I think about artificial light. Sure, it’s a human invention. But it still helps you read a bedtime story to a child who is very much real. It still lets you see their face in the dark. The origin of the light doesn’t make the moment any less tender.

The Language We Deserve

So what do we call it? “Assisted reproduction” is technically accurate but lands like a tax form. “Family building” sounds like a Lego set. I’ve tried out “science baby” in casual conversation, which usually makes people blink twice. One friend, also an IVF veteran, calls hers a “petri dish special.” I love the humor in that, the way it snatches back a little power. Laughter is the only thing that cuts through the saccharine, pseudo-spiritual language that clings to fertility discourse like a sticky residue.

I’m not proposing we throw out the dictionary. But I am suggesting we pay attention to the weight of the words we toss around. When we call one path “natural,” we implicitly call the other “unnatural.” And “unnatural” has a long, ugly history of being applied to people and families that don’t fit a narrow mold. I’m not interested in feeding that beast.

What I want is a vocabulary that acknowledges the grit and the grace of how families actually come to be—not through magic or machine alone, but through a strange, stubborn alchemy of both. I want language that makes space for the father who gives himself shots in the belly in a gas station bathroom because the timing was off. For the surrogate who carries a child that shares none of her DNA but all of her warmth. For the adoptive parents who endure home studies that feel like an endless, invasive interrogation.

The Absurdity of “Trying Naturally”

Let’s talk about the phrase “trying naturally.” It’s a euphemism so baked in that even doctors use it. “How long have you been trying naturally?” they ask, as if I might have been attempting to conceive via carrier pigeon. The phrase implies that anything else is—say it with me—unnatural. But when you break it down, “trying naturally” is just a polite way of saying “having a lot of scheduled, often joyless sex while staring at a calendar.” There’s nothing inherently sacred about it. It’s just the default setting.

I remember the month we finally stopped “trying naturally” and moved to IUI. The relief was palpable. No more pretending this was romantic. No more lying to ourselves that a glass of wine and a sunset would do the trick. It was clinical. It was honest. And, in its own way, it was a kind of grace.

What We Pass On

I think a lot about the stories we’ll tell our kids. Mine is still young, still more invested in trucks and cheese sticks than his own origin story. But one day, he’ll ask. And I won’t tell him he was a “miracle of science” in a hushed, reverent tone. I’ll tell him the truth: that he was wanted so badly, so ferociously, that we were willing to let strangers in scrubs help us. That his first picture, the one we have framed, is a grainy photo of a five-day-old embryo. It looks like a tiny, glowing pineapple. It is, to this day, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I want him to know that his story isn’t a sanitized, inspirational poster. It’s a story that involves needles and debt and crying on the kitchen floor. It’s a story that involves his father holding my hand while a doctor talked about “grades” of embryos as if they were cuts of beef. It’s a story that is, in every way that matters, completely and utterly human.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the label “natural conception” bother so many people who used fertility treatments?

Because it sets up a false hierarchy. The term “natural” implies that conception without medical help is more genuine, more pure, or more legitimate. For those of us who built our families with the help of science, hearing that our children are somehow “unnatural” can feel like a subtle but persistent form of judgment. It erases the very real, very human love and effort that went into bringing them here.

Is “artificial insemination” an outdated or harmful term?

It’s not necessarily harmful on its own, but it can contribute to a sense of otherness. The word “artificial” can make the process sound cold and mechanical, ignoring the emotional reality. Many prefer more neutral terms like “intrauterine insemination (IUI)” or simply “fertility treatment.” The key is to be mindful of how such words land on someone who is in the thick of the experience.

How can I support a friend going through IVF without using clichés?

Skip the platitudes. Don’t tell them to “relax” or that “everything happens for a reason.” Instead, acknowledge the specific difficulty. Say, “This sounds incredibly hard and unfair, and I’m here for whatever you need.” Offer concrete help: a freezer meal, a ride to an appointment, or just an hour where you don’t talk about fertility at all. And never, ever call their future child a “test tube baby” unless they use that term first and with a laugh.

What’s a better way to talk about different paths to parenthood?

Use language that centers the outcome—a wanted child—rather than the method. “Family building” is a broad, inclusive term. You can also just ask people how they prefer to describe their experience. Some embrace humor (“petri dish special”), others prefer clinical terms, and some don’t want to discuss it at all. The best approach is to follow their lead and treat every family’s story as whole and complete, exactly as it is.

In the end, the words will always be imperfect. But maybe that’s the point. Family isn’t something you can label neatly. It’s a mess of biology and choice and accident and stubbornness. It’s a love that doesn’t care whether it started in a bed or a petri dish. And that, I think, is the most natural thing in the world.

The first time someone called my daughter’s conception ‘artificial,’ I laughed. It was a sharp, half-choked thing—the kind you let out when a word slaps you before your brain can catch up. Sandbox small talk at a playground. A mother I barely knew asked about my pregnancy. I mumbled something vague about IVF. She nodded. That slow, performatively thoughtful nod. Then she said, “Well, it’s wonderful what science can do. Even if it’s not the natural way.”

I wanted to ask her what exactly she meant. That my daughter was synthetic? Assembled in a lab from spare parts and a dash of hubris? Instead, I smiled. The smile you learn to wear when you had to fight for the title ‘mother,’ and the world keeps trying to slap a qualifier on it.

This language—‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’—is a quiet plague in family building. It seeps into conversations, medical consent forms, well-meaning blog posts, and the hollows of your own head at 2 a.m. when the baby won’t sleep and you wonder if you’re failing some cosmic exam. A binary that pretends to be neutral. But it’s loaded. Moral judgments. Bad science. A pastoral fantasy that has zip to do with the bloody, messy, actual work of making and raising a human.

The Myth of the Natural Parent

Let’s start here: ‘natural’ is a word that’s been poked and prodded by food marketers and fertility gurus until it means almost nothing. In conception, it usually points to sex. Unassisted, unmedicated, unmonitored sex that somehow, magically, results in a baby. It’s the story we’re fed from childhood—love makes a family, and biology follows obediently. Frame that as the default, the pure, the natural way, and every other path becomes a deviation. A glitch. An artificial intervention.

I didn’t set out to have an IVF baby any more than someone sets out to have a breech baby or a C-section. Infertility isn’t a lifestyle choice; it’s a medical condition. Calling the treatment ‘artificial’ is like calling chemo ‘unnatural’ because it didn’t sprout from a root vegetable. Technically true in the shallowest sense, and entirely missing the point. The point is the result: a living, breathing, screaming person who’s no less real because her first cell division happened under a microscope.

And yet, the language sticks. Why? Because we’ve built a moral architecture around ease and suffering. Get pregnant without trying—or with minimal trying—and there’s a subtle assumption you’ve done something right. Your body is virtuous. You’re more aligned with the earth, with womanhood, with the divine plan. Meanwhile, those of us who injected hormones into our bellies, mapped our cycles like cartographers of a hostile land, paid small fortunes for the privilege of being prodded with transvaginal wands—we’re the unnatural ones. The mad scientists of motherhood.

The IVF Identity Crisis

Confession: I’ve used the language myself. Early days, I’d say things like “We did IVF” with a tiny apologetic shrug, like I was admitting to cheating on a test. I’d clarify we “tried naturally” for years first, as if that bought me legitimacy. I wanted people to know I wasn’t one of those women—the ones who jump straight to technology, too impatient for nature, wanting to play God. I’d swallowed the hierarchy whole without even noticing.

The irony? IVF was one of the most natural experiences of my life, if natural means raw, painful, and wholly out of my control. The hormone crashes. The bloating. The hope that metastasizes into despair. The tiny embryo that somehow, against all odds, burrows in and stays. None of it felt artificial. It felt primal. My body doing exactly what bodies do: adapting, failing, trying again, surviving. The petri dish was just a pit stop.

But ‘artificial’ doesn’t just sting. It separates. It creates a two-tier system of parenthood where some families are real and some are constructed. I’ve watched this play out in adoption, where “natural parents” still means biological parents, as if the adoptive ones are synthetic. As if love is a material you manufacture instead of growing, slowly and stubbornly, through sleepless nights, scraped knees, and the thousand tiny rituals that stitch a family together.

What We Lose When We Split the World in Two

The natural/artificial binary isn’t just inaccurate. It’s boring. It flattens the wild diversity of how families actually come to be. I know a woman who got pregnant the first month she tried and then developed severe preeclampsia, delivering her son at 28 weeks. Was that birth ‘natural’ because it started with sex and ended with a baby? Or ‘artificial’ because a NICU team kept her child alive with machines and medications? I know a gay couple who used a surrogate and an egg donor. Their twins are so unmistakably theirs—in gesture, in humor, in the way they wrinkle their noses—that the biology feels irrelevant. I know a single mother by choice who used donor sperm and now jokes her son is “half miracle, half FedEx.”

All these stories resist clean categorization. They’re messy and human and full of science and chance and love all tangled up. But the language we’ve inherited doesn’t have room for that mess. It wants binaries: male/female, biology/technology, real/fake. And in the process, it erases the actual experience of so many parents—the grief, the logistics, the absurdity, the joy.

The Dark Humor of the Petri Dish

If infertility taught me anything, it’s that you have to laugh or you’ll dissolve. So here’s some dark humor: I’ve started calling my daughter my “lab-grown” child, just to watch people’s faces. Friends who know us well laugh. Strangers get a panicked look, like I’ve just confessed to a sci-fi experiment. It’s small, petty revenge on the language that tried to other us.

Because here’s the truth: every baby is a little bit lab-grown now. Prenatal vitamins, genetic testing, ultrasounds, epidurals, Pitocin, formula, antibiotics—the line between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ is a moving target and always has been. My grandmother gave birth at home with a midwife and no pain relief. Sounds very natural until you hear the stories of infection and hemorrhage that were just part of the deal back then. I gave birth in a hospital with an epidural and a team of nurses and a doctor who caught my daughter with gloved hands. Was one of us more authentic? Or were we both doing what we could with the tools we had?

The fetishization of the ‘natural’ birth and the ‘natural’ conception is, at its core, a kind of privilege blindness. It assumes everyone’s body works the same way. That everyone has access to the same choices. That everyone’s path to parenthood is linear and sweet. It ignores the miscarriages, the failed cycles, the years of negative pregnancy tests, the money, the marital strain, the way infertility can hollow you out and leave you feeling like a ghost in your own life. Calling IVF ‘artificial’ is a way of dismissing all that. A way of saying, “Your suffering doesn’t count because you took a shortcut.”

Reframing the Vocabulary

So what do we say instead? I don’t have a perfect answer, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. Language is stubborn. It carries history and culture and all the little prejudices we’d rather not admit we have. But I’ve noticed the power of small shifts. I say “assisted reproduction” instead of “artificial reproduction,” because assistance is something we all need, in one form or another. I say “my pregnancy” instead of “my IVF pregnancy,” because the method doesn’t define the experience. I try, when I can, to talk about conception as a spectrum rather than a binary—a tangle of biology, timing, luck, and sometimes, yes, medical science.

And when someone else uses ‘natural’ in that loaded way, I’ve stopped smiling. I ask, gently, “What do you mean by natural?” Most people don’t know. They’re just repeating a script they absorbed, the same way I once did. They’re not trying to be cruel; they’re just not thinking. And maybe that’s the real work—not policing language, but waking people up to what their words actually say.

The Baby at the End of the Story

My daughter is three now. She collects sticks and tells me they’re magic wands. She screams when she’s tired and laughs when I sing off-key. In every way that matters, she’s exhausting and ordinary and miraculous. Nobody who meets her asks if she was ‘natural’ or ‘artificial.’ They just see a child—wild, sticky, entirely herself.

Maybe that’s the only answer I ever needed. The language we use to talk about how families are made matters, because it shapes how we think about ourselves and each other. But at the end of the story, there’s just a kid. A kid who doesn’t care about petri dishes or hormones or the semantics of her origin. She wants a snack and a story and someone to hold her when the world gets too big. That’s not artificial. That’s the realest thing there is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s wrong with calling IVF ‘artificial’?

The word ‘artificial’ carries a connotation of being fake, inferior, or unnatural. When it gets slapped onto IVF or other assisted reproductive technologies, it can stigmatize families and dismiss the very real physical and emotional labor involved. Medically, IVF involves human cells, human bodies, and human processes—just with a little extra help. A more accurate term is ‘assisted reproduction,’ which acknowledges the support without implying the result is less valid.

Is a ‘natural’ birth better than one with medical interventions?

There’s no universal ‘better’—only what’s right for a specific body, health, and set of circumstances. The idea that an unmedicated, intervention-free birth is superior can shame parents who need or choose C-sections, epidurals, inductions, or other medical support. A safe, healthy outcome for both parent and child is the goal, no matter the path. The natural/artificial divide usually ignores the complexity of real births.

How can I talk about family building without using loaded terms like ‘natural’?

Focus on specific, descriptive language. Instead of “natural conception,” try “conception through intercourse” or “unassisted conception.” Instead of “artificial insemination,” try “assisted insemination” or “IUI.” Ask yourself if the distinction is even relevant—often, saying “we had a baby” is enough. If you’re unsure, follow the lead of the person who shared their story, and use the words they use.

There’s a specific violence to the word “natural” when it lands on a body like mine. I felt it first under the fluorescent glare of a supermarket aisle, eight months pregnant but not showing in a way a stranger could clock. A woman bumped my cart with hers and asked, “Is it a natural pregnancy?” She meant well, I think. She meant: Was there sex? Was it spontaneous? Did you do it the way people in perfume ads do it? I could have told her about the needles, the timed intercourse that felt like a NASA launch sequence, the embryo frozen for three years before it became the girl now kicking my ribs. Instead, I said, “No, it’s supernatural. We summoned her through a portal.” The woman laughed, nervous, and pushed her cart toward the dairy case. I stood there, a failed witch, a successful science experiment, and I started to understand that the language we use for how families come to be isn’t just sloppy. It’s a quiet, ongoing referendum on who counts as real.

I’m Jenna Luisa Ferrer, and I’ve built my family with the help of reproductive technology, adoption paperwork, and a stubbornness my mother calls “unladylike.” I’m also the kind of person who cries at the ending of Paddington 2 and burns toast with religious consistency. I’m not a medical marvel. I’m a mother. And still, the world keeps handing me a vocabulary that splits my experience into two piles: the one that counts and the one that doesn’t.

The Ghost in the Adjective

“Natural” is a word we pretend is neutral. It sits in prenatal vitamins and birthing classes and the well-meaning questions of relatives who want to know if you did it “the old-fashioned way.” But the old-fashioned way, historically speaking, includes a lot of death. Maternal mortality, infant loss, infertility that was simply called fate. The word acts like it’s about biology, but it’s always about morality. A “natural” conception is pure, unmeddled, blessed. An “artificial” one is Frankenstein’s monster, a cold room full of pipettes, a doctor who gets paid too much. The split is so baked into the language we barely notice we’re serving judgment alongside the birth announcement.

I started noticing it when my daughter was three. A friend from a playgroup, a woman I actually liked, said, “It must be so different, bonding with a child who isn’t biologically yours.” My daughter is biologically mine. She grew in my uterus. She shares my genetic material. But she was conceived through IVF with donor eggs, and in my friend’s mind, that made me a kind of surrogate for my own life. The irony: nobody asks a father who used donor sperm if he feels like a real dad. The language of suspicion is reserved for mothers. We’re the ones whose bodies get held up to the light and examined for signs of cheating.

The Infertility Confessional

If you’ve gone through fertility treatment, you know about the compulsory confession. It’s the moment someone asks an innocent question—“Are you hoping for another?”—and you have to decide how much of your medical file to dump onto the picnic blanket. I used to overexplain. I’d recite my follicle counts, my miscarriage dates, the exact pH of my husband’s semen as if I were a very unsexy sommelier. I did this because I thought transparency would buy me absolution. If they knew how hard I’d worked, maybe they’d grant me the title of “real mother.”

But the absolution never comes. Because the logic of the “natural” framework is religious, not rational. You can’t earn your way out of it with suffering. There’s always another test: Did you carry the baby yourself? Did you use your own eggs? Did you try acupuncture first? Did you pray? The questions are a funnel, and at the bottom is a tiny, impossible standard: a conception that happened without thought, without effort, without the indignity of a transvaginal wand. I’ve met women who conceived on a first date and felt guilty about it. I’ve met women who spent six figures on treatments and still felt like frauds. The shame is a cloud that rains on everyone.

Adoption and the Language of Rescue

My son came to us through adoption, and with him came a whole new glossary of terrible phrases. “Real parents.” “Own child.” “Gift.” I am his real parent, and I’m also his real parent who once spent forty-five minutes looking for his shoes while he sat on the floor eating a cracker he found under the couch. That’s a level of mundane devotion no biology can guarantee. The “gift” language is worse. It frames adoption as a transaction where a baby is handed over by one woman to another, wrapped in gratitude. But my son’s birth mother did not give me a gift. She made an impossibly hard choice inside a set of circumstances I’ll never fully grasp. Calling it a gift erases her grief. It also implies my son is an object that can be given, rather than a person who has his own story, his own losses, his own right to be angry about all of it someday.

We talk about adoption as if it’s a rescue mission. “You saved him,” people say, and I want to scream. He saved me from a life that was smaller than the one I have now. He isn’t a before-and-after photo. He’s a child who likes dinosaurs and hates the texture of mashed potatoes and will someday have to integrate a narrative that began before he could speak. My job isn’t to be his savior. It’s to be his mother, which means being a witness to his whole truth, even the parts that hurt.

The Artificiality of It All

Let’s talk about “artificial.” The word comes from the Latin artificialis, meaning “made by art.” And if there’s anything I’ve learned from building a family in the cracks of the expected, it’s that there is a great deal of art involved. The lab technicians who selected the embryo that became my daughter weren’t robots. They were people who went home at night and worried about their own parents and forgot to buy milk. The social workers who handled our adoption paperwork weren’t cogs in a machine. They were exhausted and underpaid and still managed to show up with a strange, bureaucratic compassion I now think of as its own kind of love.

Every family is made by art. The art of showing up, of choosing each other over and over, of learning the specific way a child likes their toast cut and then doing it that way for a decade. The biological act of conception is the least interesting part of parenthood. It’s a spark. The fire is everything that comes after. I have a friend who got pregnant on her honeymoon, a story she tells with a shrug, because what she really wants to talk about is the son who has autism and the years she spent learning his language. That’s the art. That’s the making. The rest is just plumbing.

Rebuilding the Vocabulary

I’ve started to correct people, not with anger but with a kind of tired precision. When someone says “natural child,” I say, “You mean biological?” Because a child conceived in a petri dish is still a natural child. She still sneezes sunlight and cries when she’s overtired and draws pictures of our family with crayons that make my head look like a potato. When someone asks if my son is “my own,” I say, “He is himself. I’m lucky he shares some of that with me.” The reframing is small, but it’s a start. Language is a muscle. You have to exercise it until the new shape feels natural—which is funny, given the topic.

I think often about what we lose when we cling to the natural/artificial binary. We lose the ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. A woman who carries a pregnancy after years of loss is not a medical miracle; she’s a person who went through something hard and got to the other side. A father who adopts a teenager from the child welfare system is not a hero; he’s a man who decided to parent a specific human being at a specific moment. The stories aren’t less sacred because they involve lawyers or injections or checks written to agencies. They’re sacred because they involve a promise. The promise is the same, no matter how you get to the starting line: I will take care of you. I will fail sometimes. I will keep going anyway.

The Dark Humor of Survival

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to be inspiring. I’m not inspiring. I’m a woman who once sobbed in a fertility clinic bathroom because the automatic faucet wouldn’t recognize my hands, and I took it as a sign from God that I wasn’t meant to be a mother. That’s not inspiring; it’s deranged. But it’s also funny, in the way horror is funny when you’ve got enough distance. The language of “natural” family building would have me treat that moment as a shameful secret. Instead, I tell it at parties. It’s my party trick. I watch people’s faces shift from discomfort to recognition. Because so many of us have been there, in the bathroom, feeling unworthy of something that was never about worth in the first place.

I’m not against the word “natural.” I’m against its weaponization. I use it to describe my daughter’s ability to find the one mud puddle in a parking lot. I use it to describe the way my son’s laugh bubbles up from his belly like a spring. Those things are natural. The way they came to me is beside the point. The point is that they’re here, and I’m here, and we’re a family—messy and complicated and fully, completely real.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it offensive to ask someone how they built their family?

It depends entirely on context and relationship. If you’re a close friend or family member, a gentle, open-ended question like “I’d love to hear your story, if you’re open to sharing” can be welcome. If you’re an acquaintance or stranger, it’s usually better to let the person offer the information themselves. For many people, these stories involve loss, trauma, or medical detail they don’t want to discuss casually. A good rule: ask yourself if you’d be comfortable describing your own reproductive history in response. If the answer is no, reconsider the question.

What terms should I use instead of “natural” and “artificial” when talking about conception?

More accurate and neutral terms include “spontaneous conception” for a pregnancy that occurred without medical assistance, and “assisted reproduction” or “medically assisted conception” for pregnancies involving treatments like IVF or IUI. When discussing parent-child relationships, “biological parent” and “non-biological parent” are clearer than “real” or “natural” parent. For adoption, simply saying “adopted child” or “child by adoption” is factual without implying a hierarchy of legitimacy.

Why does the language around family building matter so much?

Language shapes how we think, and the words “natural” and “artificial” carry heavy moral connotations. When we call one path to parenthood “natural,” we imply the other paths are unnatural, lesser, or suspect. This can cause real harm: it contributes to the shame and isolation felt by many people who use fertility treatment, donor conception, surrogacy, or adoption. Using precise, neutral language helps create a culture where all family stories are honored, and children don’t grow up feeling like their origins need to be explained away.