The Trump administration intends to use funds from a decades-old federal program that provides birth control to low-income women to ramp up efforts to help aspiring mothers get pregnant, signaling a shift in policy that will appease both religious conservatives and adherents of its Make America Healthy Again agenda.
The first sign of the change appeared on a little-noticed government website last week, in a post offering a $1.5 million grant to start an “infertility training center.” The center would promote “holistic” approaches to combating infertility, such as menstrual cycle education classes that women also take to try to prevent pregnancy without using birth control.
The announcement of the training center is the clearest sign yet that the administration plans to take a new approach with the federal family planning program known as Title X, and point it more toward combating infertility, a goal that President Trump has made part of his agenda.
The announcement is also an early indication that the administration is backing an alternative approach to infertility — one supported by conservative and religious policy groups that are skeptical of in vitro fertilization, even after Mr. Trump promised as a candidate last year to make I.V.F. free. A formal White House report on infertility was delivered to the president in May, several months after Mr. Trump pledged in an executive order to lower the cost of I.V.F., but has not yet been released to the public.
While Title X has historically focused primarily on providing contraception, the program already offers a wide range of services beyond birth control, including testing for sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy tests, as well as basic infertility care. But the vast majority of patients who come to Title X clinics are looking for birth control or S.T.D.-related services, several experts and grant administrators said.
Advocates who provide contraception to low-income women said they were surprised and concerned when they noticed the announcement on the government website.
“This is a huge alarm,” said Angie Fellers LeMire, the co-founder of Community Centered Reproductive Health, an organization dedicated to increasing access to contraception in low-income and rural communities. “It changes the focus of the program.”
Ms. Fellers LeMire said she worried that putting a greater spotlight on infertility in Title X clinics would mean less money for birth control for women seeking to avoid pregnancy.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, pushed back strongly on that idea, emphasizing that Title X would “continue to deliver on this mission of ensuring access to a broad range of family planning and preventive health services.”
