What You Didn't Expect in Fertility, Pregnancy & Birth: Real Stories & Expert Insights

 In today's episode, my guests challenge is with miscarriage. She has two miscarriages both at the end of the first trimester, and then uses IVF (despite the fact that getting pregnant isn't the issue)...and get's pregnant, and has a miscarriage....eventually she becomes the mother of two girls, but that's later in the story. She is a writer, and in one of her pieces about this...

Today we hear the second half of my conversation with Kristine. Last week we heard about her first pregnancy that ended in a stillbirth. She just started talking about her second pregnancy, which was looking and feeling too much like the first one for her comfort. And she's gone into the hospital at 27 weeks to get checked out. Near the end of our conversation, when reflecting on her experien...

Being able to create a new life inside your body is both an awesome feat and one fraught with the real possibility of death. Once you really hone in on the millions of things that have to go right in the just right way to make a baby, it's a wonder anyone is born ever. Today's guest spends time on both sides of this line. Her first pregnancy ends at the beginning of her third trimester i...

Few of us enter pregnancy and delivery with a crystal clear picture of what the experience will be like the first time.  In some ways, this makes sense, given that everyone's experience will be unique in certain ways, depending on their health, their age, their partner, their history...but the distance between the narrative today's guest received from her mother and her actual experience...

Today we hear from two women, one’s an author and generally in the book world and the other is an author, grief counsel and  therapist. Individually, these women encountered challenges with their own pregnancies. They’ve come together to write a book that helps women to process the events of their pregnancies and birth by writing about it. For extended show notes, see: http://warstoriesfromthewomb...

Today we hear part two of my conversation with Diana about her experiences with pregnancy and delivery. Last week, our conversation ended with Diana 41 weeks pregnant, partially dilated, stomping around in the hall of the hospital trying to get her baby to move into a better position for birth. When all of a sudden she loses her sight. We'll pick up the conversation where we left off in this...

Today's guest grew up with a mother who is something of an earth goddess, meaning that she was involved in a movement toward empowered birthing long before it's a main cultural current. So the seeds of an idea of what a birth should look like were planted early in my guests life. In the course of her first delivery, preeclampsia fell on her out of a clear blue pregnancy–one that was norm...

 Today’s show shares the conclusion of Nina's experience as a pregnant 40 year old, trained in psychiatric nursing. She experiences many challenges, some unexpected, and other's that are less surprising. She talks about navigating an unwanted C section and peripartum and postpartum depression.   This is a weekly show that highlights real pregnancy, birth & postpartum stories.

Today’s show features a guest that can give us some perspective on the current climate around two important topics: abortion and postpartum depression. She’s a psychiatric nurse practitioner, who experienced an abortion in the 1970s and peripartum and postpartum depression in the 1990s. She’s written about her experience. In a piece, titled “No Stranger”. Here are some excerpts from her writing. F...

Today's episode features the story of an extremely challenging pregnancy that ended in a late term abortion, which was difficult for many reasons, and made more so by the politics and legal apparatus around abortion. My guest was well into a pregnancy that felt off to her in ways she could describe, but which didn't trigger any particular medical action, because first, the diagnosis when...

Today's guest had a pregnancy marked by extremely easy things and significantly hard things. Getting pregnant was consistent with the kind of fertility you see in a romantic comedy instantaneous, but the first trimester morning sickness was more like a sci fi thriller, totally extreme and requiring all kinds of medical help. And after a pretty challenging pregnancy, she ran into postpartum de...

Today's episode features a moving story from a woman who recalls her first pregnancy in the late 1960s. The pregnancy was unintended. She was 18. Her parents, her social setting, and the cultural expectations of the time suggested that she had two options: either to marry her then boyfriend and start a family or have the baby in secret and surrender the newborn to the social workers who vague...

In general all the stories women shared on the show reflect on Roe in part because they show how challenging pregnancy can be both physically and mentally even when pregnancy is highly sought after. That's one of the major take homes from this podcast real women sharing their actual experiences and hopefully contributing to a more realistic narrative around pregnancy and birth. And today&apos...

Today's episode features a difficult but important story. It’s the kind of story we avoid in part because it involves difficult emotional topics—sexual assault and unintended teenage pregnancy—topics that society does not handle gracefully. My guest today was sexually assaulted by her partner as a teenager, and carried this unintended pregnancy to term, at which point she put the baby up for...

These days the word mother can mean a lot of different things. As today's guest shares, she sought out the birth of her first child, but the second pregnancy was unintended. Her preference for family size clashed with her partners, Although she may have been open to terminating the pregnancy, her partner was not; she was living in a state whose majority is not particularly supportive of a wom...

Today's guest did not anticipate that pregnancy would offer a totally smooth ride to parenthood, but the ride she did encounter included a number of experiences that were nowhere near her radar. Managing a lot of challenging conditions like preeclampsia, and post partum anxiety had significant effects on her: first it encouraged her to reimagine what her family would look like and to find con...

This show is focused so far on the unexpected elements of the emotional or physical toll of pregnancy and birth. Today that story is extended to include the emotional and physical impact of a pregnancy that didn't find its footing and ended in abortion. Abortion is obviously a topic most people have strong feelings about. And unfortunately, those strong feelings tend to flatten the conversati...

Today's guest, like many of us, encountered some unexpected twists and turns at the delivery that were challenging to manage in the moment. But the focus of the story she shares today is about race and identity--she gives us a sense of what it's like to live in the world both as a daughter who doesn't resemble her father, and as a mother who doesn't superficially look like her...

Today's guest has an interesting spin on the difference between her expectations for the pregnancy and birth and her experience. Going into pregnancy she had a number of health conditions that led to a lot of cautionary talks about the many things that could go awry...and then, when she actually was pregnant--she more or less skated through a problem free pregnancy...so she's left both f...

Today's guest has a host of experiences when it comes to creating a family. She and her partner had their first child when she was 35. And when they tried to have another, things didn't quite line up. And so she and her partner looked for adoption, something she'd always been interested in exploring, as she herself was adopted. She’d anticipated that her experience would draw her cl...

In today's episode, my guest is a friend of mine shares her story. She comes up against a host of extremely difficult situations and challenges in her quest to have a child. Her story has some elements that many people will relate to preterm labor and issues with her cervix, and other issues with IVF and surrogacy that I think really showcase her resilience and strength and make the birth of...

American culture has a lot of ideas about pregnancy and motherhood baked into it. And even if you don't subscribe to most of the common tenants, pregnancy and birth can still offer unexpected twists and turns. Today's guest got pregnant relatively easily and for the better part of nine months had a smooth experience. She meticulously researched every aspect of birth, pulling the traditio...

If, in your attempts to start a family, you run into trouble getting pregnant you quickly learn about a thousand elements involved in the process of getting pregnant: hCG and estrogen and the uterine lining and if you are making use of IVF technology to get pregnant, a whole other set of elements enter the equation: the quality of eggs and sperm and if you are lucky embryos, and then, again, if yo...

Pregnancy, both physically and emotionally,  is a personally transformative event no matter what else is going on in the pregnant person’s life. The context in which you are experiencing this pregnancy, be it calm or dramatic, can add to the challenge. Today’s guest experienced flux in both her extended family, her immediate family, and the medical community she was a part of. While she successful...

Pregnancy involves massive changes and for some of us, one of the first hurdles is overcoming  issues that have developed in our bodies that make getting pregnant and being pregnant difficult. On the road to becoming pregnant, today's guest learned that she had endometriosis, an issue that she'd painfully lived with for years without a diagnosis, and which required surgery before a pregn...