Advocacy Doesn't End in April: How to Show Up Right Now

If you've ever sat in your car after a fertility appointment doing math on what the next cycle will cost — or read a denial letter from your insurance and felt the floor drop out — you already understand why advocacy work matters. You don't need to be told. The harder question is what to actually do with that knowledge when you're already exhausted.

This spring, the answer got a little more concrete. RESOLVE expanded its annual advocacy push from a single week in April into a full Month of Action through May 2026, with organized activities around policy change, education, and storytelling.¹ The shift sounds administrative, but it matters: one week was never enough to match the pace of what's happening in legislatures right now.

Why a longer runway, and why now

Infertility policy in the U.S. is moving in two directions at once. On one hand, more states are debating insurance mandates that would require coverage for diagnosis and treatment. On the other, some of those bills are dying in committee or on the floor — quietly, with very little public attention.

Minnesota is the most recent example. A state insurance mandate bill that would have expanded fertility coverage failed to pass the Senate this May, despite years of organizing behind it.² If you live in Minnesota and you've been paying out of pocket, that's not abstract. That's another year of the same math.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, there's an employer-focused rule proposal in motion that could shape how — and whether — companies offer fertility benefits to their workers. These aren't symbolic fights. They determine whether a 32-year-old with endometriosis can afford IVF, whether a same-sex couple's path to parenthood is treated as medical care or a luxury, whether a single parent by choice has any help at all.

This is the context the Month of Action is dropping into. It's less a celebration and more a coordinated response to a stretch where a lot of decisions are being made about your body and your family without you in the room.

What "advocacy" actually looks like (it's smaller than you think)

The word "advocacy" tends to conjure marble steps and lobbyists in good suits. That's part of it, but it's a small part. The version that actually moves bills looks more like this:

Telling your story, even badly, even briefly. RESOLVE's current campaign leans on the idea that personal stories are what shift legislators — not statistics, not white papers.³ A two-paragraph email to your state senator about why coverage matters to you is worth more than a hundred form letters. You don't have to be eloquent. You have to be specific.

Showing up where decisions get made. That can mean a virtual lobby day from your kitchen table. It can mean a 10-minute phone call to a staffer who logs your concern in a database the legislator actually reads. It can mean attending a town hall and asking, out loud, where your representative stands on fertility coverage.

Talking about it where you already are. Most people in your life don't know that 1 in 6 adults globally experience infertility, or that most U.S. states still don't require insurance coverage for it. They don't know because we've been told for decades not to talk about it. Breaking that silence in your own circle is advocacy, even when it doesn't feel like it.

If you want to do one thing this month

Pick one. Not all of them. One.

• Find out what your state is doing. Is there a fertility insurance bill active in your legislature? Has one recently failed, like Minnesota's? RESOLVE keeps a state-by-state tracker, and a five-minute look will tell you whether you have a live fight in your backyard.
• Write to one elected official. Your governor, your state senator, your U.S. representative — pick whoever has the most direct power over the issue you care most about. Keep it short. Lead with your story. End with one specific ask ("I'm asking you to support [bill number]" or "I'm asking you to publicly support fertility coverage for state employees").
• Ask your employer a real question. Not "do you offer fertility benefits?" but "what's covered, what's the lifetime max, and does it include preservation, donor gametes, and surrogacy?" If the answer is thin, ask HR what it would take to expand it. Employers move when employees ask in numbers.
• Share one piece of your story publicly. A social post. A conversation with a friend who doesn't know. A comment on a news article about a fertility bill. You decide the size.

What to do with the anger

If you watched the Minnesota bill fail and felt something hot and tired rise up in your chest, that's a reasonable response. It's also a useful one, if you can channel it before it curdles into despair.

Bills come back. The Minnesota mandate will be reintroduced. So will others. The reason advocates keep showing up year after year is that fertility policy moves on a slower clock than the one your body is on — and that gap is brutal, and it's also the reality. The work is to keep the pressure on so the gap shrinks for the next person.

You are allowed to opt in and out of this work. You can do one email this May and nothing else for the rest of the year, and that is still more than most people do. You can also decide that this isn't your season to fight publicly, and that grieving privately is the only thing you have capacity for right now. Both are legitimate.

But if you've been waiting for a sign that your voice would actually matter somewhere — this is a month built for that. The infrastructure is set up. The bills are live. The legislators are listening more than they were five years ago, in part because people like you stopped being quiet.

Whatever you do with that, do it on your own terms. Just know the door is open.

A question worth sitting with

What's the one piece of your fertility, adoption, or surrogacy experience that, if a stranger in power understood it, might change how they vote? Start there. That's your story. That's the one worth telling.