What It Costs to Have a Baby: Fertility, Fibroids & the Fight for Queer Parenthood

The story we almost didn’t tell - a personal, unfiltered conversation about fertility, fibroids, and what it’s like to try and build a family as a Black queer couple.

Aiwan speaks candidly about internalised shame, cultural silence, and growing up in a faith community where sex, queerness, and pregnancy were taboo. Tamanda reflects on what it meant to come out of a ten-year heterosexual relationship without a child - and how a shocking fertility diagnosis turned everything upside down. Together, they walk through their experience navigating IVF as LGBTQ+ partners, from being misdiagnosed and dismissed to being held by an unexpected community of Black women on Instagram.

This episode is about reproductive injustice, maternal health inequalities, and what it costs - emotionally, physically and financially - to pursue parenthood outside the scripts we’re given. From NHS waiting lists to shared motherhood, from AI babies to planned parenthood, we talk about the long road to making a family when love isn’t enough and biology isn’t simple.

This is a story about grief, grace, and making peace with the babies we imagined - and still deeply long for.

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