IVF DADDIES

Fresh or frozen? It sounds like a logistics question. It's not. Richard gets asked this constantly, and the answer almost always depends on something the clinic never asked first: what do you actually want your family to look like? In this episode Richard and Julio work through one of the most misunderstood decisions in an IVF or surrogacy journey. Why frozen embryos became the clinical default. W...

Before you sit down with your doctor and they start talking about genetic testing, there is a conversation that should happen first. Richard has it with hundreds of patients every year. This is that conversation. Richard Westoby works with intended parents every day before they see their doctor. Pre-implantation genetic testing is one of the first things that comes up and also one of the things pe...

SPOTIFY DESCRIPTION You've done the research. You've read the blogs. But there's a specific moment in the IVF journey that almost every gay man gets blindsided by and it's not the one you think. Dr. Michael Gornaccia of New England Fertility Institute has spent over 30 years helping LGBTQ families build through surrogacy, egg donation, and IVF. In this episode, he walks through the real timeline,...

Candy Crash spent 25 years believing she was not allowed to want a family. Ten weeks ago, she became a dad. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Parenthood Journey 01:16 The Emotional Growth of Becoming a Parent 03:21 Experiences as an Au Pair and Changing Perspectives 05:02 Support Systems in Same-Sex Parenting 09:31 Balancing Organization and Creativity in Parenting 13:38 Trusting Professionals in the...

Most people start this journey knowing the cost. Nobody warns them about everything else. Katy Encalade has been a surrogate herself. Now she runs one of the most respected egg donation and surrogacy agencies in the US. This conversation is the one most intended parents wish they had before they started. What you will actually hear in this episode: Why two years is the real timeline and why anyone...

The legal ground under surrogacy is shifting. For once it is shifting in your favor. If you are LGBTQ+ and you have been quietly terrified about what this administration means for your family, this is the episode that answers it directly. No vague reassurances. No spin. Just a fertility attorney with 15 years in reproductive law telling you exactly where you stand. What this episode covers: Michig...

Your embryo grade is not what you think it is. Embryologist Emanuela Molinari has spent her career inside the lab watching families make critical decisions based on information they do not fully understand. This episode fixes that. What you will actually learn: Why two clinics can look at the same embryo and give you completely different grades. Why a perfect grade does not guarantee a pregnancy a...

Everyone talks about the embryos. Nobody talks about what happens to the relationship. IVF puts a number on your family. Success rates. Grades. Transfer windows. And somewhere inside all of that data, the relationship that started this entire journey is quietly breaking under the pressure nobody warned you about. Julio and Richard go there in this episode. Fully. What this episode covers: Why IVF...

He spent years reporting on how families are built around the world. Then he had to build his own. Pedro Andrade is a journalist and television host who has documented cultures across six continents. But nothing prepared him for the system of decisions, patience, and uncertainty that is IVF and surrogacy. In this episode Pedro tells the full story. Finding an egg donor. Matching with a surrogate....

Surrogacy is not just a medical process. It is infrastructure. And right now that infrastructure is being rebuilt whether the industry is ready or not. IVF Daddies investigates what has actually shifted in the surrogacy landscape over the past year, what it means for intended parents, and why the families who start informed are the ones who finish protected. This is not a promotional conversation....

One man helped move gay fatherhood from legal impossibility to corporate insurance policy. This is the conversation about what that actually cost and who controls the infrastructure now. Ron Poole-Dayan founded Men Having Babies. Over two decades he helped reshape how governments, corporations, and insurance companies think about surrogacy, infertility, and LGBTQ+ family building. He did not do it...

Kim Kardashian froze her eggs on camera. Janet Jackson had a baby at 50. The message millions of women absorbed: you have time. The message reproductive doctors are exhausted from correcting: you do not. Dr. Brooke Freeman is a reproductive endocrinologist. She spends her days cleaning up the damage left behind by oversimplified celebrity fertility narratives, reassuring doctors who meant well, an...

No rulebook. No legal framework. No guarantees. Just two people who refused to stop. This episode is not a success story with a tidy ending. It is what actually happens when the system was not built for your family and you have to find a way through it anyway. They tried to become parents in the Netherlands. A country where the legal grey zones around surrogacy and family building are not edge cas...

When politicians control reproductive healthcare, families pay the price. A public health doctor who has spent his career on the frontlines is done staying quiet about it. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis has worked inside some of the most politically pressured healthcare systems in America. He has watched IVF access erode. He has watched surrogacy get weaponized in policy debates by people who have never s...

Ryan Murphy made a TV show about divorce, power, and reproductive rights. And accidentally created the most important IVF conversation mainstream America has had in years. Kim Kardashian froze her eggs on camera. Now she is starring in a show where embryo custody becomes a weapon in a divorce. Ryan Murphy is a dad via surrogacy himself. And ALL'S FAIR just made millions of people confront some...

Something shifted. And if you were paying attention at BravoCon, you felt it. The storylines dominating reality TV right now are not just entertainment. They are the most powerful visibility machine the LGBTQ+ community has ever had access to. And the people inside that machine are starting to understand what they are actually doing. This episode is a conversation about that moment. The one where...

Every intended parent knows the feeling. Your phone rings. Your heart stops. And in the seconds before you answer, you are already a different person than you were before. This episode is about that moment. And every moment before and after it that the brochures, the consultations, and the success rate statistics never mention. IVF Daddies and DADS.KIDS.MIRACLES share the unfiltered emotional real...

Your attention is not free. Every complaint, every spiral, every moment you spend feeding the wrong thought is costing you something you cannot get back. Jorge Perez figured this out the hard way. Then he wrote a book about it. Then the celebrities started calling. This is the conversation about what actually happens when you stop letting your mind run the show and start directing it deliberately....

Nobody handed gay dads a parenting manual. So they wrote their own. And what they built in the process is something the traditional parenting world did not see coming: a community, a movement, and a new definition of fatherhood that is more intentional, more visible, and more honest than anything that came before it. Richard and David join IVF Daddies to talk about Hey Gaddies, what it actually ta...

Most fertility clinics were built for straight couples. The protocols, the language, the assumptions baked into every consultation. LGBTQ+ families have been navigating a system that was not designed for them and paying full price to do it. Dr. Said Daneshmand is done with that model. This episode is the fertility conversation that queer families have been trying to find for years. No jargon. No a...

He performs in full drag to sold-out audiences across Belgium. He is also a parent. And the world has had a lot of opinions about whether those two things are allowed to coexist. Mocca Bone from Drag Race Belgique sits down with Richard Westoby for one of the most unexpectedly moving conversations IVF Daddies has ever recorded. Because underneath the sequins and the beard and the spotlight is a pe...

The fertility industry spent a decade selling egg freezing as an insurance policy. Dr. Sarah Mikowski is here to tell you what the fine print actually says. This is not an attack on egg freezing. It is the honest version of the conversation you deserved to have before you walked into a clinic, saw the glossy brochure, and got a number that felt reassuring but told you almost nothing useful. What t...

You beat cancer. You did the hardest thing a human body can do. You survived. And then you found out that the treatment that saved your life may have taken something else. The chance to have a child. The future you were fighting to get back to. Dr. Paul Brezina works at the intersection of oncology and fertility. He sees what happens when cancer survivors discover too late that there was a window...

In 2025, LGBTQ+ families across Europe are boarding planes to have children because their own governments have made it legally impossible to do it at home. This is not a hypothetical. It is the daily reality for intended parents navigating a continent where surrogacy law changes at every border, parentage rights disappear when you land at the wrong airport, and the family you built legally in one...

You got your results. You Googled at 2am. You are still not sure what any of it actually means for your chances of having a child. You are not alone. And it is not your fault. Dr. Linnea Goodman joins IVF Daddies to do the thing most fertility consultations do not have time for: explain what your numbers actually mean, what they do not mean, and why the gap between those two things is where most p...