Every woman struggling with infertility deserves to know what’s wrong with her body before someone sells her a $30,000 workaround. That conviction is my life’s work. Yesterday, it landed my homemade butter in The New York Times. The profile made sure to note my homemade raw milk butter — a “MAHA elixir,” as they called it — alongside our sourdough, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and my request to be called “Mrs. Waters.” My actual work promoting root-cause care for infertility received less airtime, unless you count the academic naysayers quoted throughout. Restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), something I “evangelize,” was framed as a scare-quote “natural” approach that “many medical experts argue may give false hope.” One reproductive endocrinologist dismissed it as “essentially a repackaging” of standard fertility care, while others allege RRM is a backdoor scheme to steer couples away from IVF “until it is too late.” Notice the trick. RRM is simultaneously an ideology with no clinical basis and care that fertility clinics already provide. Both cannot be true. Either it’s just an ideology, or they already offer it. The reality is neither: RRM is not an ideology (the medical approach has been around since the 1970s, or so), and fertility clinics are not offering it, which is perhaps why more and more patients are rethinking the “one-size-fits-all” model of IVF in favor of personalized approaches to treating the underlying causes of their infertility. When I joined Heritage in 2022, I pitched them on the idea of building out a conservative policy platform addressing reproductive technology, infertility, and promoting the health of men, women, and babies. At the time, it was a niche issue, to say the least. I had an intuition that it would become a major one, and in 2024, right as the presidential election cycle reached a fever pitch, that hunch paid off. With the Alabama Supreme Court decision — which declared frozen human embryos are persons in the case of a Wrongful Death of a Minor suit — IVF moved to the forefront of the political debate, with both parties positioning themselves as the “pro-family, pro-IVF” side. What quickly became apparent then, and is the basis of my work now, is that even if social conservatives managed to enact protections for parents and human embryos undergoing IVF, or even if others managed to enact an IVF mandate, both approaches would fail to answer the deeper and far more consequential question: how do we help couples who are dealing with infertility have the children they desire? To unpack this, it is helpful to begin with what infertility is. Infertility is not a standalone disease or condition. It doesn’t present itself like a cancer tumor, heart disease, or a ruptured appendix. Infertility is a symptom of underlying conditions such as endometriosis, PMOS, thyroid dysfunction, insulin resistance, and hormonal imbalances in women, or low sperm count, low sperm motility, and other lifestyle factors in men. And, unlike the impression one often has, the burden is shared roughly equally between men and women, with research finding an average of four or more such conditions in one or both partners when a couple is diagnosed. That’s why restorative reproductive medicine works with the body to diagnose and treat these underlying causes, relying on cycle tracking, targeted lab testing, lifestyle interventions, medical and hormonal therapies, and corrective surgeries to restore natural fertility for both men and women. And, unlike IVF, which bypasses the body to create human embryos, RRM works to improve egg and sperm quality, decrease miscarriage rates, balance hormone levels, and optimize a woman’s body to support the child in utero. And, despite the claims made by dissenters in the article, there is a large and growing body of clinical evidence to back this up. In an Irish general-practice study of 1,239 couples, most of whom had been trying to conceive for over a year, such restorative treatment produced a 52.8% live-birth rate over two years. An international study spanning 10 clinics in four countries found 44% of couples achieved a live birth despite averaging nearly five diagnoses per couple. In one of the largest cohorts studied, 62.1% of couples took home a baby after a median of 11 months. In another study, among women who had already failed IVF, restorative care achieved a 32.1% live-birth rate, with 92% of those babies delivered at term, with a single twin pregnancy in the entire cohort. Compare the incumbent: $15,000 to $30,000 per IVF cycle, a live-birth rate of roughly 32% per cycle, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an average of more than two cycles per baby, and success rates below 10% for women over 40. Indeed, cost estimates for RRM range from $2,000 to $16,000, depending on surgery and insurance, but with success rates comparable to or higher than IVF. And, if a couple’s natural fertility is restored, they don’t have to restart more cycles if they want to have more kids. Moreover, while IVF bears much higher risks for the mom and baby — including higher rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, and multiples — RRM is the only approach that actually improves the health of mom, dad, and baby. Which brings us back to Dr. Kallen’s claim in the New York Times that this is all “repackaging” of standard care, to the detriment of patients who cannot conceive with these kinds of treatments.” If restorative medicine were already standard, Arkansas would not have needed to pass a first-in-the-nation law to get it covered. RRM physicians would not be forced out-of-network because insurance coding has no language for the diagnostic work they do. And medical residencies would presumably teach it, and yet researchers reviewing training programs found that “knowledge of fertility does not change throughout residency training.” As for the claim that RRM delays essential care (i.e., IVF), it is important to keep two things in mind. First, given that infertility is a symptom of underlying conditions or pathologies, targeted treatments to restore health are the treatment. And second, even if a couple later decides to move on to IVF, their success rates will likely be higher, as their own bodies are much healthier than if they had just done IVF first. Indeed, what I appreciate about RRM is that restorative physicians don’t promise a baby. They do, however, emphasize and work exceptionally hard to improve the overall and reproductive health of men and women, including their ability to conceive and birth children. As journalist Madeleine Kearns found in her reporting, couples told her it was the IVF doctors who tended to make promises they couldn’t keep, whereas restorative physicians were more honest: no guaranteed baby, but no stone left unturned in figuring out and treating the problem. For example, a March 2026 survey from Carrot found that 89% of women would prefer to try a less invasive option for treating infertility before anything else, and 78% said they would choose these options first if they simply had better information about them. Other polling shows that nearly 80% of Americans want personalized care that treats the root causes of infertility. The demand is clearly there; what has been missing is access and awareness. The Times also noted my view that IVF, egg freezing, and delayed marriage could mean more women “[run] out of time.” I stand by it, because this is the deeper problem with treating access to reproductive technology as the solution: the promise of these technologies’ shapes when — and whether — we marry and have children at all. Indeed, one of the most common and unsupported claims in modern discourse is that more IVF will raise the birth rate. But as Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies has argued, IVF subsidies don’t boost fertility; they change who has babies, and when. Younger women become slightly less likely to have children, older women slightly more, and the net effect is a wash, except that the woman who might have had three children starting in her late 20s now has one or two starting at 40. The numbers bear it out: IVF accounted for about 2.3% of first births in 2022, but only 1.8% of second births and 0.9% of third. A technology sold as insurance against the biological clock could, in practice, have the unintended consequence of further delaying fertility. That is why expanding real access and awareness is what my work focuses on, and it has been succeeding at every level of government. In the last year and a half alone, Arkansas became the first state to enact the RESTORE Act (promoting such root cause care), with other states following suit. The Texas GOP even included Natural Procreative Technology (part of RRM) in its party platform. Federally, Congress has introduced a bicameral RESTORE (Reproductive Empowerment and Support Through Optimal Restoration) Act, with the Department of Health and Human Services advancing several grants this year alone, promoting innovative root-cause approaches to infertility, fertility tracking, and body literacy. Moreover, the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Treasury proposed a rule allowing employers to offer standalone fertility benefits covering diagnosis and treatment of infertility’s root causes. The deadline to submit a public comment closes on Monday, July 13. Even President Trump, the self-described father of IVF, now says such root-cause care “will hopefully reduce the number of couples who ultimately need to resort to IVF.” He’s right. It’s not about being “anti-IVF” or trying to limit options. Quite the opposite. It is about ensuring couples have more options than ever before to treat their infertility, starting with the least invasive root cause approaches first. And, as for the birth of more “beautiful babies,” one recent simulation found that expanding restorative care could raise the U.S. fertility rate from 1.77 toward 2.02, which is within reach of the fertility replacement rate. Meanwhile, the associations dismissing all this as “ideology” are the same ones that recently redefined infertility to include a person’s relationship status, meaning that two men or a single woman could be deemed “infertile” despite their own bodies, if properly united with the opposite sex, bearing no causes for infertility. Let that sink in. No two men, no matter how hard they try, can conceive a child, and yet certain states and leading fertility organizations redefined infertility to include them. So, while the Times wonders what to make of a 28-year-old who likes raw-milk butter, I am far more interested in empowering men and women with access to real fertility care. Besides, if it’s just an ideology, doesn’t work, or is already being offered, Big Fertility should explain why it finds it so threatening. *** Emma Waters is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and the author of “Lead Like Jael: Seven Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith” and host of the new podcast Rethinking Fertility. 

The playwright Oscar Wilde, in “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), quipped that “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry,” suggesting that the institution of marriage has a way of smothering romance under the weight of habit and familiarity. This same institutional cynicism animates A24’s latest comedy, “The Invite,” Olivia Wilde’s loose adaptation of a 2020 Spanish film, “The People Upstairs.” From the outset, we are introduced to Joe and Angela, played by Seth Rogen and Wilde, a bickering couple trapped in the throes of a loveless marriage, held together primarily by resentment and their 12-year-old daughter. Wilde, who also directed the film, has a masterful grasp of Angela’s archetype. Her performance wonderfully exudes the insecurities and frustrations of a repressed housewife, functioning on a cocktail of prescription medication and channeling her anxieties into perennial redecoration. This leads to such vexing domestic inquiries as “Is that a new rug?” when her husband stumbles home, weary and stupefied, from work. The reason Angela has procured this new rug, we soon learn, is to impress their hip and suave upstairs neighbors, Hawk and Piña, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz at her most seductive. Indifferent to conventional mores, the couple throw lavish swinger parties and express affection in such excessive and saccharine degrees that they begin to resemble villains in a Larry David sketch. Joe and Angela know this because, every other night, they can hear what sounds like a brothel operating directly above their ceiling. For Angela, this bohemian hippie lifestyle presents something of a buoy. Her sexuality is so thoroughly repressed that she sees Hawk and Piña’s arrival as a last-ditch opportunity to “spice things up.” The film is appreciably cleverer than simply sending its vanilla couple tumbling into a lewd spiral of orgies and erotic humiliation. Its real interest lies in the awkward and comic realization that a sexually fallow marriage is often a symptom of emotional detachment. Rogen, whose raspy disposition I usually find grating, portrays Joe with such conviction that you would think he had personally experienced the same failures and resentments. A defeated jazz musician, Joe has been relegated to teaching at a third-rate music conservatory and smoking pot — his version of prescription Xanax — in an apartment he inherited from his parents. Eventually, he concedes to being a failure who amounted to nothing. Joe and Angela live in a constant state of misery, unwilling to connect with each other except through complaint. “We haven’t had sex in a year,” they confess later in the dinner party. It is under these grim and isolating circumstances that Angela tries to bring fresh friends into their lives by inviting over the upstairs libertines. “We’re not cancelling; we don’t have friends,” she scowls at Joe after he suggests they are unprepared to host, having arrived home worn out from work and without the wine she had asked him to fetch. Hastily finalizing her charcuterie before the guests arrive, Angela whips out a perfectly fine bottle of champagne from the fridge and asks, “Is this weird?” Joe, confused, replies that yes, it is: “What is this, New Year’s?” This is plainly wrong. Champagne is the perfect aperitif for any dinner party at any time of year. It is refreshing, sprightly, and naturally pairs with anything. Are these people so estranged from pleasure that even champagne seems suspicious? Among the most celebrated episodes of NBC’s “The Office” is “Dinner Party.” It is engrossing precisely because of how difficult it is to watch, capturing clawing awkwardness and discomfort with almost sadistic precision. It is a testament to Wilde’s directorial talent that “The Invite” captures a similar feeling of morbid embarrassment and unease. Complementing intimate camera shots with tense, brooding string arrangements composed by Devonté Hynes, Wilde creates a palpable sense of claustrophobia inside the couple’s apartment, such that the rooms themselves often feel like part of the cast in the evening’s slow-motion collapse. I have rarely recoiled with as much discomfort and internal pain as I did watching a wide-eyed, wickedly desperate Wilde coerce Rogen into opening a 1982 Château Haut-Brion, the legendary first-growth Bordeaux from Pessac-Léognan, to serve their guests in the absence of literally anything else in their apartment. The indignity is compounded by Joe pulling it out of a cupboard and uncorking it without even bringing it to proper cellar temperature, to say nothing of decanting the bottle. It is an act of vino vandalism, made worse by the knowledge that nobody in the room is emotionally stable enough to appreciate what has just been sacrificed. Returning to Oscar Wilde, the film ultimately pushes back against his aphorism. Marriage has not stripped Joe and Angela of affection; their reluctance to communicate has. Their love has withered under years of avoidance and disappointment. This becomes exceedingly clear when their lascivious guests begin divulging their raunchy escapades and give the beguiled Joe and Angela what amounts to a TED Talk on swinging. “There’s a menu you mark off: bondage, pegging, whatever you’re into,” Hawk explains, as if he were a waiter reciting the specials. Despite its R rating, the film is largely suggestive in dialogue rather than explicit in action. Its most revealing moment comes when Angela and Joe, both brimming with sexual frustration, indulge their guests’ amorous advances, only to botch their attempted orgy with the grace of Woody Allen trying cocaine in “Annie Hall.” This barely qualifies as a spoiler, since the film’s tone is decidedly conservative. This is hardly some avant-garde French exercise where orgies are as encouraged and commonplace as cigarettes. What Joe and Angela come to understand is that intimacy and physical affection are manifestations of love and mutual trust. Detached from that context, sex becomes a vapid hedonistic pursuit, thrilling in the moment and hollow almost immediately after, leaving you chasing the same high in perpetuity. “The Invite” is a thrilling minimalist comedy about love, marriage, and family. As Wilde’s third directorial feature, it is easily her strongest, conveying a palpable conviction in family as something worth preserving rather than escaping. There is a memorable scene in which Angela bellows at a moping Joe, “You have a daughter who worships you,” reminding the erstwhile musician that there are far more important things in life than stardom and sold-out shows. Oscar Wilde’s skepticism toward marriage holds no weight here. The reason to marry, “The Invite” suggests, is precisely to remain — and always be — in love. *** Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Israel has shared intelligence with the United States indicating that Iran has developed a new plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to multiple reports citing sources familiar with the matter. The warning, first reported by The Wall Street Journal and later corroborated by CNN, marks the latest in a years-long series of Iranian threats against Trump following the 2020 U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. According to CNN, one source said Israel relayed the warning to U.S. officials this week, while another said American intelligence agencies had already been tracking a steady stream of threats against Trump in recent weeks. The Israeli intelligence reportedly described a more specific assassination threat than previously known, though no details have been made public.  Neither the White House nor Israeli officials publicly commented on the reported intelligence. Iran’s mission to the United Nations also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Instead, the White House referred reporters to remarks Trump made Wednesday. “They want to take out the U.S. leader — me,” Trump said. “I’m on every list. I saw this morning, I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a little bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long.” Trump added that Iran’s leaders are “evil, sick people” and compared the regime to “cancer” that must be confronted before it spreads. Iran has repeatedly vowed revenge against Trump since the January 2020 strike that killed Soleimani, one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful military commanders and the architect of many of Iran’s regional proxy operations. Calls for Trump’s assassination have remained a recurring feature of official Iranian rhetoric. During recent funeral ceremonies following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, mourners chanted “Death to Trump” while banners declared, “We Will Kill Trump.” The Justice Department has previously charged individuals linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in assassination plots targeting former Trump administration officials, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. While U.S. officials have not publicly confirmed the specifics of Israel’s intelligence, the reported warning underscores that threats against Trump remain an ongoing concern for American security agencies.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will host representatives from more than 60 countries next week for a counterterrorism summit focused on what the Trump administration describes as a resurgence of transnational political extremism, particularly violent far-left networks. The July 15 gathering in Washington follows President Donald Trump’s counterterrorism strategy released earlier this year, which prioritizes disrupting politically motivated violent groups, including anarchist movements and what the administration describes as Antifa-affiliated networks, while also addressing extremists on the political right.  According to the State Department, the meeting will bring together ministers and senior officials from Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere to improve intelligence sharing and law enforcement cooperation against politically motivated violence. “Our counterterrorism operating system needs an update to deal with the reality of such threats, to protect American citizens and U.S. national security and interests,” a State Department official told Reuters. The initiative, however, has drawn criticism from some current and former government officials, European diplomats, and terrorism experts, many of whom argue the administration is overstating the scale of the far-left threat. Some European officials have reportedly questioned why their governments were invited, saying left-wing political terrorism is not viewed as a major national security concern in their countries. Others have expressed concern that expanding counterterrorism authorities could eventually be applied against domestic political activists.  The summit comes after several high-profile incidents involving alleged Antifa-affiliated extremists in the United States. Most notably, the Justice Department last month announced lengthy prison sentences for members of what prosecutors described as a “North Texas Antifa cell” that carried out a coordinated July 4, 2025, attack on the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Prosecutors said the group arrived armed with firearms, explosives, body armor, and medical kits before launching fireworks and explosives at the facility, vandalizing property, and opening fire on responding officers. One Alvarado police officer was shot in the neck during the attack.  Federal prosecutors argued the attack demonstrated planning, encrypted communications, reconnaissance, and coordination consistent with organized political violence rather than spontaneous protest. FBI Director Kash Patel said investigators would continue targeting Antifa funding networks.  The administration has also cited repeated confrontations outside ICE detention facilities and immigration enforcement operations as evidence that violent anarchist networks have become increasingly organized. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott defended the summit, saying far-left political terrorism is “an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences” and argued that previous administrations had not adequately addressed it.   

It was 30 years ago this month that a couple of college students in Kennewick, Wash., stumbled upon a rare archaeological discovery — one that would help trigger a war between science and racial identity politics, or what we now call “DEI.” Three decades later, it’s clear that if we don’t act quickly, it’s a fight science will probably lose. What the students found was a 9,000-year-old skeleton that was soon nicknamed Kennewick Man. It was certainly one of the most precious anthropological finds ever. At the time, it was the oldest human skeleton ever found in North America, and it had signs of an injury from an arrow or a spear. More intriguingly, it seemed to have less in common with the skeletons of Native Americans than with those of ancient Japanese peoples, thus potentially changing our understanding of how humans first arrived in the New World. But that’s when the federal government stepped in. Under a law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, skeletons found on federally owned land (as Kennewick Man was) must be turned over, or “repatriated,” to the Native American tribes they’re related to. NAGPRA was written in response to the actions of 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologists who sometimes engaged in practices that would be unacceptable today to acquire specimens, and it requires not only the “repatriation” of human remains, but also of “funerary objects” — that is, things buried alongside bodies. Kennewick Man was far older than any existing tribe and not related to any of them. Nevertheless, tribal officials insisted that the bones be kept away from scientific study and turned over for reburial, which would destroy their usefulness for scientific research. In compliance with those demands, federal officials confiscated the skeleton and buried the Kennewick Man site under 600 tons of rock and fill to prevent any further discoveries. Scientists sued, arguing that NAGPRA simply doesn’t apply to objects that old. After years of litigation, federal courts ruled in their favor. Indeed, the courts found that government officials had acted in bad faith and awarded the scientists $2 million in attorney fees. A year later, even though DNA research revealed that Kennewick Man was closest to South American indigenous peoples, an executive order by then-President Barack Obama forced the scientists to turn Kennewick Man over to a group of Northwest Coast Native American tribes who destroyed the bones forever. That was bad enough, but in the years since, tribal activists and sympathetic politicians have taken increasingly aggressive positions in demanding the “repatriation” of specimens — many of which have no true connection to tribes, and others that aren’t even particularly old. Some museums have even “repatriated” artworks made in the 1980s and purchased from gift shops — as if these were sacred remnants of someone’s ancestors. Today, in museums across the country, it has become common to see empty display cases, featuring signs like the one spotted recently at the San Diego Museum of Us: “As part of our decolonization process, these items have been moved to a sanctuary space.” Equally absurd are cases in which scientists are forced to relinquish animal bones — literally the trash our ancestors threw away — on the theory that they’re somehow “funerary objects” that should be off-limits out of racial or religious sensitivities. What’s more, some museums have adopted rules based on tribal practices to govern how scientists handle objects in their collections. These sometimes bar female scientists from handling specimens, since that’s sometimes prohibited by Native religious taboos. Museums are also required by federal regulation to have “advisory” committees that include practitioners of tribal religions. Christians, Jews, and Hindus aren’t given the same preferential treatment. It’s hard to imagine a starker example of the collision between racial identity politics and the scientific rationality that our social and technological progress depends on. Out of deference to politically correct race politics and irrationally romanticized conceptions about “stolen land,” the institutions where science should reign supreme are being suborned into erasing the accumulated knowledge of centuries. In effect, an entire field of scientific inquiry has been placed at risk by an overzealous activist movement using the regulatory power of the state. The study of human remains and artifacts isn’t just some antiquarian hobby. It provides critical insights about present-day issues like climate change and provides insights that can help police officers solve crimes. But entire areas of anthropological research may now be shutting down, thanks to the aggressive use and misuse of NAGPRA. The science of anthropology can still be saved if we act now. Museum officials and state governments can push back. For one thing, many “repatriation” efforts aren’t actually required by NAGPRA. Museum leaders should refuse to be cowed by activist demands that fall outside the law. And states should adopt legislation prohibiting the return of specimens that are too old to be associated with a tribe or too young to be a “funerary object.” They should also forbid any museum from following rules that discriminate on the basis of sex or religion. Science is too precious to be sacrificed to the political demands of DEI and the wishful thinking of angry activists who prioritize race over research, discovery, and progress. *** Timothy Sandefur is the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. Elizabeth Weiss is a professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University and author of the Goldwater Institute report, “The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology”