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.

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When I walked out of the IVF clinic for the last time, I didn’t have anywhere to go.

I had done everything a patient is supposed to do. For over a decade, I had lived what most people would call a low-tox life. I avoided polyester, BPA, and the endocrine disruptors hiding in everyday products. I paid attention to what I put in and on my body because I believe that our health is shaped by the small daily choices most people never think about. So when my husband and I struggled to conceive, I assumed I would walk into a fertility clinic, get answers, and find a path forward.

I tracked my cycles. I sat through the hormone panels, the hysterosalpingogram, the saline infusion sonogram, the genetic testing, the semen analysis, the ultrasounds. Every test came back normal. And at the end of it, a doctor I had met for less than 30 minutes told me my diagnosis was “unexplained infertility” and that the next step was IVF due to my age: 31.

That was it. There was no other path offered. No further investigation. No specialist to consult. No suggestion that maybe, just maybe, “unexplained” didn’t mean there was nothing wrong, but that no one had looked hard enough to find it.

When you are told IVF is your only path to motherhood, you do not weigh it as one option among many. You weigh it against childlessness. That is not informed consent. That is a cornered decision. Women across this country are walking into IVF cycles not because they have chosen it freely from a range of options, but because they have been handed an illusion that this is the only door left.

The grief of that is hard to describe. You inject yourself with hormones you do not fully understand, you mortgage your savings, you absorb the physical toll, and underneath it all is a quiet voice asking whether anyone has actually tried to understand your body. For many women, the answer is no.

@healthillie Wild ride #ivf #infertility ♬ original sound – Live Healthillie

Restorative reproductive medicine fell into my lap. I did not find it because I was a smarter patient or a better advocate. I found it because I got lucky, and that should not be how women find answers about their own bodies.

Think about what is being asked of women in my position. We are expected, with no medical training, to somehow know that our doctors haven’t looked thoroughly enough. We are expected to advocate for tests we have never heard of, request referrals to specialists no one has mentioned, and second-guess the experts we are paying to guide us. How is a patient supposed to know what “extensive enough” looks like? That burden should not be ours to carry. But it is.

When I finally sat down with an RRM doctor, the consult lasted over an hour. He went through my history, my cycles, my labs, my surgeries, and patterns in my family. By the end of that conversation, he was recommending a diagnostic laparoscopy.

I was scared. I was also genuinely confused. I had no symptoms. No debilitating periods. No pelvic pain. No outward signs that something was wrong. Every standard screen I had been given had come back unremarkable, and now a doctor I had just met was telling me he believed there was something to find and that the only way to know for sure was surgery.

I said yes. And what they found inside of me was something very different than what I had been told. One of my fallopian tubes was, in fact, blocked — not open, as my IVF clinic’s hysterosalpingogram had indicated. I had stage 1 endometriosis, an inflammation of the uterine lining. I had a cyst blocking my cervix. And I had fibroids covering my uterus.

This was the body my IVF clinic was prepared to transfer embryos into.

I believe healthy embryos, the product of an extraordinarily expensive and physically grueling process, would have died inside of me, not because the technology failed, but because of medical neglect. No one looked closely enough to find what was actually wrong with me first.

Here is what I want every woman reading this to understand. The standard pathway in mainstream fertility care often looks like this: You get a basic workup, and if nothing obvious turns up, you are routed toward IVF. There is very little in between. And the women who do get a diagnosis — PMOS, endometriosis — are largely funneled toward the same destination. Sometimes a few rounds of intrauterine insemination are offered first, often because insurance requires it before covering IVF, not because IUI is the most appropriate next step. The diagnosis changes. The recommendation rarely does.

PMOS patients face significantly elevated risk during ovarian stimulation. A 2021 study published in “Frontiers in Endocrinology” followed nearly 2,700 women with PMOS undergoing IVF and found that roughly 25% developed ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (a complication that ranges from uncomfortable to genuinely dangerous, sometimes requiring hospitalization). The rate in the general IVF population is around 5%. Yet PMOS patients are rarely referred to specialists who treat the underlying drivers of their condition first, steps that could change what treatment they need at all, or make IVF safer if they do choose it.

Endometriosis is associated with lower IVF success rates, and the most effective treatment for the disease itself is excision surgery performed by a skilled endometriosis surgeon. Yet rather than being referred for treatment of the underlying disease, women are often told to suppress it hormonally in preparation for transfer. Suppression is not treatment. It manages the disease for the cycle; it does not address it.

These are not fringe conditions. They affect millions of women, and the standard pathway treats them as obstacles to bypass on the way to IVF, rather than as conditions deserving dedicated care.

I am telling my story because women deserve to know there are real, evidence-based diagnostic and treatment steps between an infertility diagnosis and an IVF cycle. We deserve more than 30-minute consultations for lifelong decisions. We deserve doctors who investigate before they intervene. We deserve to know that “unexplained” sometimes just means “not yet examined.”

Most of all, we deserve choice, not the illusion of it. We cannot explore our options if we are never given any.

I had to find that out the hard way. I am writing this so the next woman doesn’t have to.

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Iliriana Balaj is the founder of Live Healthillie, the author of “Yummy Colors,” and an integrative nutrition coach. She has dedicated her life to founding a low-tox marketplace sourcing the cleanest brands and advocating for people creating a healthier life for themselves by education and informed consent.

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I Thought IVF Was My Only Path To Motherhood. Then Everything Changed.