This is Fertility

Infertility treatment is often a series of choices. Do you try IUI? How many rounds? What about IVF? Can you afford it? Do you transfer one fresh embryo, or do you freeze them all? What about pre-implantation genetic testing? Is it worth the additional expense? Doctors can recommend a treatment path, but each choice is tied to money and time, and it's up to the patient to weigh those things agains...

Nearly one-third of infertility cases are caused by some sort of issue with the female, nearly one-third are caused by some sort of issue with the male, and the rest is caused by some combination of issues with both partners, or the cause is simply unknown. The fact is, male infertility is as common as female infertility, we just don't usually talk about it that way. That's likely because regardle...

June is Pride Month, and this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, a series of spontaneous demonstrations by members of the gay community at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. And while there is still a lot of work to be done to bring true equity to the LGBTQ+ community, today's story is a demonstration of how far we've come over the past 50...

When Alaina Bos found herself struggling to conceive after being diagnosed with both endometriosis and PCOS she felt frustrated and alone. Fortunately, after months of trying she was finally able to have her baby, and she wanted to use her talents as a photographer to help others who found themselves in a similar position. So, she started a project called, Face of Infertility. Today's host is Carl...

It can be hard to balance a demanding workplace with a goal of family building. If the first step to having a baby for many is timed intercourse, how do you manage when you have no time for intercourse? In today's episode, we'll hear from Staff Sergeant Helena Giammarco who plays the French Horn in the United States Airforce band. She and her husband had no trouble conceiving their first child, bu...

Life is filled with shifting priorities. Your focus when you were younger is a lot different than your focus now. As you enter the workforce, especially as a woman, shifting priorities doesn't stop, and the choices get tougher. If your workplace doesn't support your family building needs, you may need to find one that does. But after years of struggling to start your family, followed by years supp...

This is the last episode in our four-part series for National Infertility Awareness Week on #InfertilityUncovered. This episode is going to follow the experience of a patient who is covered by the Progyny Fertility Benefit, while taking a deep dive into an invaluable resource she found along the way, The Progyny Patient Care Advocate Team. Infertility is a disease that demands support, and today w...

This is the third episode in our four-part series for National Infertility Awareness Week on #InfertilityUncovered. Why, in 2019, are American workplaces still so bad at dealing with issues around infertility? That is the question that Katherine Goldstein, reporter and host of the podcast The Double Shift, asks in her article for Slate titled, "IVF & The Office." Katherine has been researching...

This is the second episode in our four-part series for National Infertility Awareness Week on #InfertilityUncovered. If a fertility benefit is offered, but there are no providers who accept it, is it really a benefit at all? In this episode we from Wajmah Yaqubi who found herself asking that very question when she researched her employer's fertility benefit. Wajmah is still trying to conceive, and...

National Infertility Awareness Week falls on 4/21 – 4/27 and this year's theme from RESOLVE is #InfertilityUncovered. For this week, we're doing a four-part series on what it's like to truly uncover the world of infertility. The first episode is with Jamie Stelter, the morning transit and traffic reporter for NY1 and a co-host with Pat Kiernan on Morning's on 1. She's been smiling on TV for so lon...

National Infertility Awareness Week is right around the corner, it's from April 21st to the 27th, and this year Resolve, The National Infertility Awareness Association, chose the theme infertility uncovered. It got us thinking, what would an episode based off of that theme look like? Well, we couldn't decide on just one topic, so we will be releasing four episodes in four days from Monday, April 2...

Samantha Busch is the wife of NASCAR champion Kyle Busch. After utilizing IVF to conceive their son, Brexton, Samantha recently experienced a pregnancy loss when trying IVF for a second child. Today, we're going to learn how she got here, what she's learned along the way, and how she's transforming her own pain into something more like joy - bundles of it! She co-founded Samantha & Kyle Busch...

Description: Being diagnosed with endometriosis is just the first step and now you're left with more questions than answers. So what do you do? You start searching on the internet and you're flooded with information. How could you possibly sort through it all? Well, there's a special Facebook group called Nancy's Nook that offers education around endometriosis to its 57,000 members. It's such a tr...

On the surface today's episode is about two women. One, Shannon Cohn, an award-winning filmmaker, attorney, and activist, and the other, Mary Alice Hatch, an endometriosis and women's health advocate. But it's really an episode about almost 200 million women - that's the estimated number of women who suffer from endometriosis in the world. Shannon and Mary Alice are co-founders of an endometriosis...

This is the second episode in our four-part series on endometriosis and we've broken this episode into two parts. After paying out of pocket for four unsuccessful rounds of IVF, Amanda Lesesne had an exploratory laparoscopy which revealed grade three endometriosis. She had the endometriosis tissue removed and decided to try IVF for a fifth time. This time she entered the process with renewed hope,...

This is the second episode in our four-part series on endometriosis and we've broken this episode into two parts. Amanda Lesesne went through four rounds of IVF before she was diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease she had never really heard of, but one that explained a lot of the symptoms she had experienced since she was a teenager. In part one, we will hear about Amanda's past, what it was lik...

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month! Endometriosis is a common, often painful, hard to diagnose condition, and it can affect a woman's fertility. For this month, we're doing a four-part series on this disease. In the first episode, we hear from Jessica Payne who experienced pain since she was a teenager. She tried to live a normal life but everything changed when she tried to get pregnant. We a...

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month. Endometriosis is a disease where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows in other parts of the body causing pain, infertility, and organ dysfunction. It is estimated that 10 to 20 percent of women have endometriosis, but it seems that most people have never heard of it. We are presenting a special series throughout March on this common, and often misunder...

The two-week wait is a term used to describe the period of time in between a treatment cycle and the first blood pregnancy test. It can be a stressful time. In today's episode Lissa Kline, a licensed clinical social worker, and Dr. Georgia Witkin, a clinical psychologist, sit down to discuss some survival and coping methods that can help alleviate some of the stress of waiting, and some ideas for...

When you fall down, you get back up again. That's an old saying. It's a lesson in persistence, and it can be applied to all aspects of life. But it's not always easy to just get back up, especially if you are struggling with infertility. Today we're going to learn the power of persistence through Lynn and Drew Polin's fertility journey. They went through multiple rounds of IVF, and a life-threaten...

Choice can really make all the difference. Tania always wanted to be a mother but realized she was running out of time. So, she decided to take matters into her own hands and through her journey connected with a community of likeminded women called Single Mothers by Choice. In this episode we hear about Tania's decision and journey to becoming a single parent by choice. We also hear about the impo...

Unless you've been through an identical experience it can be difficult to understand what it's really like for those who are struggling to build their families. But what if there was a place where people could communicate their personal stories of infertility in a way that others could truly understand? The ART of Infertility, founded in 2014, curates innovative and emotionally provoking art exhib...

In 2018 we heard from some amazing people who shared their fertility stories with us. Stories of struggle, frustration, pain, sacrifice, hope, joy, and love. In this episode we look back at a season of This is Infertility, from the beginning to the end, as we try to get a true sense of what it means to build a family. Today's host is Dan Bulger.

After years of trying to have a baby via fertility treatments, Becky Fawcett and her husband chose to adopt their first child. When deciding if they should try IVF for baby number two, Becky realized that adoption was now her preferred path to parenthood. The adoption process can be extremely complex and prohibitively expensive, which is why Becky founded an organization that helps bridge the fina...

When Laura Perez turned 35, she felt like she was running out of time. She was in a long-term relationship, but her partner already had children from a previous marriage and indicated that he didn't want to have any more kids. So, Laura took things into her own hands and froze her eggs. For Laura, freezing her eggs was an empowering process that gave her peace of mind, and it also changed the natu...