A new national prayer campaign launched by pro-life company EveryLife is encouraging couples desiring a child to sign up for daily prayer in 2025.
In a video featuring pictures of prominent pro-life supporters, the company states, “To the one who knows children are a gift, one of life’s greatest joys … maybe you already have little ones, or maybe your arms are still waiting. God is at work in the waiting. And we would love to pray for you.”
The company is accepting prayer requests through April 11 for married couples longing for their first or more children. Couples will be prayed for by name each month by a team including Live Action Founder Lila Rose and her husband, professional surfer and speaker Bethany Hamilton and her husband, and PublicSquare CEO and founder Michael Seifert and his wife. The #PrayingForMoreBabies2025 initiative will also deliver regular words of encouragement, Scripture, and more via email and include the names of specific prayer partners.
A Growing Problem
Though many local churches pray over parishioners longing for children, and Catholic churches offer guidance for the establishment of fertility support groups, the EveryLife campaign is a uniquely public display of support.
A quiet but growing problem, infertility in the U.S. has hit over 13 percent. Yet it’s a tough issue to talk about. “No one wants to enter into anyone else’s suffering if she doesn’t know the right words to say that will offer comfort,” said Katie Schuermann, author of He Remembers the Barren, a book of conversations with married Christian couples wrestling with infertility.
The world has a limited lexicon of comfort for these couples, and it’s mostly dominated by “control” language, such as birth control, family planning, and reproduction, Schuermann said. But this way of talking and thinking upends women’s normal and God-given desire for children.
“This inherent desire for children has been abused and used against women,” said Rebekah Anderson, an expecting mother of six who has experienced multiple miscarriages. “In response … there is an over-correction in Western society that has resulted in pressuring women to hold back on their inherent desires and convince themselves that career, identity in other areas, and/ or money will make up for this [longing].”
As more Western women put off childbearing, trying to conceive later in life gets more difficult.
Holistic Help
Traditional health care responds to infertility with expensive and increasingly controversial in vitro fertilization (IVF), with decreasing success rates as women age. In response, some practitioners offer holistic and highly successful fertility methods through Natural Procreative Technology, or NaPro.
The Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Nebraska, specializes in this type of care. The institute provides training for health care providers and has treated tens of thousands of patients from around the states and the world.
Sherin George, a family-practice physician’s assistant who focuses on holistic hormone health and works for MyCatholicDoctor, is trained in NaPro technology and FEMM, another comprehensive women’s health and wellness program. She offers a variety of fertility health approaches tailored to a patient’s desires and needs, calling her own experience with traditional fertility care “dismissive” at best. Many nonholistic doctors immediately offer solutions without even trying to find the root causes of infertility through testing.
Monica Bergeron, a Creighton Model Fertility Care practitioner who was trained at the Pope Paul VI Institute, has assisted hundreds of couples through fertility health and wellness. She stressed the need for doctors not to treat women’s infertility woes as a “disease” because typically there’s a treatable root cause.
When irrevocable issues do preclude childbearing, however, there is still a blessing in that knowledge. “Knowledge of the body frees women from judging themselves, knowing they are lovely and beautiful and not broken,” Bergeron said.
Loss and Permanent Infertility
When couples experience the loss of a child through miscarriage, Bergeron encourages them to name the child, grieve their loss together, pray, and seek out the support of trusted community members, family, or counselors. She also encourages them to seek physical healing for underlying illnesses, if possible.
But what about those who have never been able to conceive naturally and are past childbearing age? Motherhood and parenthood are still part of a Christian woman’s calling, Schuermann said.
“I’m a Christian, therefore the things I want to hear in times of loss are the promises God has actually made to me in His Word, not that He will make me a mother through my womb but that He will give me neighbors to serve, even mother, in this life,” Schuermann said.
In other words, even in insurmountable infertility, couples can discern new motherly and fatherly vocations, whether through foster parenting or adopting, or devoting themselves to other mission work that allows them to serve others in an enriching parental role.
That’s why people like George, who battles a severe autoimmune disease requiring medication that prevents her from conceiving, can bear their crosses with hope. She fulfills her desire to create life by helping others with their fertility.
A Campaign to Educate
Natural procreative providers seek to uphold the beauty and dignity of the human body in their care. But despite NaPro’s many accolades, trained providers still struggle to gain recognition and reimbursement. IVF affords much more opportunity for reimbursement than natural reproductive technology, George said. Insurance coding for more holistic women’s health is limited at best.
MyCatholicDoctor physicians are working with policy writers to change that. Especially given President Donald Trump’s recent IVF executive order, holistic providers hope to gain a foothold for restorative fertility treatment.
In the meantime, they pray for more babies.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.
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