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.