Kallie Humphries knows what it means to set an improbable goal and spend years working toward it.
Growing up in Calgary, Canada, she decided as a child that she wanted to become an Olympic athlete. At first, she thought skiing would get her there. But then she discovered bobsled, and that was the sport where her talent and determination ultimately came together. Six Olympic Games and three gold medals later, Humphries had spent much of her life, proving what extraordinary effort can accomplish.
But motherhood was different for her.
Humphries had always wanted to be a mom. Not long after she turned 30-years-old, she and her husband began trying to start a family. But years passed and she was unable to get pregnant.
Eventually, an MRI for an unrelated hip problem revealed a large ovarian cyst. Surgery led to yet another diagnosis: advanced endometriosis. These new diagnoses provided an explanation not just for her difficulty in conceiving but for symptoms she had experienced for many years.
Infertility is one of those places where the language of planning and persistence can collide with the reality of biology. There are medical conditions that can make becoming pregnant difficult, and there also are times when even the most extensive medical workup cannot determine a definitive cause. Wanting a child, planning for one, and doing everything right doesn’t guarantee that it will happen naturally.
For Humphries, in vitro fertilization, IVF, offered a path, but it didn’t offer certainty. She had spent years asking extraordinary things of her body and watching it respond to the effort she invested in the process. IVF was different. There was no training regimen that could guarantee the outcome, and none of it came easily. She would ultimately need multiple treatment cycles.
But beyond the stress these interventions would put on her body, there was another limit as to whether or not she could keep trying: money.
Humphries initially had thought that fertility treatments might cost around $20,000. Expensive to be sure, but something she and her husband could afford. At one point in her journey they had exhausted their savings and only were able to continue when a family member stepped in to offer help.
By the time her son was born, she had spent nearly $70,000.
Just under a third of employer health plans cover fertility medications, which means that IVF is often paid for at least partially out-of-pocket. The costs can skyrocket when multiple attempts are necessary.
That’s one reason that the lower fertility-drug prices available through TrumpRx matter so much. Under the Trump Administration’s drug-pricing agreements, the medications used for a single IVF cycle have fallen from more than $5,000 to less than $3,000. One of the biggest reductions is for Gonal-F, a drug used to stimulate the ovaries, which saw a drop from about $3,000 to $1,000. For someone like Humphries, who went through five cycles, a $2000-per-cycle reduction could yield a $10,000 savings on just that single medication alone. That doesn’t make IVF affordable for everyone, but it does make IVF possible for more people.
Lower prices cannot make IVF work the first time. They cannot eliminate the injections, procedures, and uncertainty that Humphries, and so many women like her, have faced. Medicine cannot make fertility entirely a matter of choice. But it can give women options when pregnancy doesn’t happen naturally. Lowering the costs of those options matters.
TrumpRx doesn’t guarantee everyone the family they might hope to have. It does mean that for more women, cost alone won’t determine whether they have the opportunity to try.
