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In this episode, Sharon Covington explores the clinical dimensions of fertility counseling and the essential role counseling plays throughout the fertility care journey. She discusses how clinicians can support patients as they navigate complex diagnoses, treatment decisions, uncertainty, and the emotional challenges that often accompany infertility and fertility treatment.

Drawing on her expertise in reproductive health and counseling, Sharon offers practical insights into integrating psychosocial care with medical treatment, communicating effectively with patients, and recognizing the clinical considerations that can shape the counseling process.

Whether you are a fertility specialist, mental health professional, nurse, embryologist, or other member of the reproductive care team, this conversation provides valuable perspective on delivering compassionate, informed, and patient-centered fertility care.

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Sharon Covington helped invent a field that didn't exist when she started. Decades before fertility counseling had a name, a curriculum, or a professional home, she was in the room with patients navigating infertility, donor conception, and the emotional weight of reproductive medicine, building the frameworks, ethics standards, and support models that the field now takes for granted. In this episode, Sharon walks us through the early days of reproductive psychology, the moments that convinced her patients needed more than medical care alone, and how she helped shape fertility counseling into the recognized profession it is today. We talk about the cases that changed her thinking, the resistance she faced along the way, and what she still wants the next generation of counselors to understand about sitting with people at some of the hardest moments of their lives.

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In 1977, a new mother in Santa Barbara named Jane Honikman couldn't find the support she needed after childbirth — so she built it herself, co-founding Postpartum Education for Parents (PEP). A decade later, on June 28, 1987, that grassroots work grew into something bigger: Postpartum Support International, founded at a landmark conference on women's mental health after childbirth that drew advocates from Canada, Australia, and across the U.S.

In this episode, Jane Honikman traces PSI's evolution from a single support group into a worldwide organization spanning dozens of countries. She reflects on the two decades she spent directing PSI, the stigma she fought to dismantle around postpartum depression and anxiety, and why perinatal mental health is still a fight worth having today. Jane also shares what led her to co-found the Postpartum Action Institute in 2016, and what she'd tell a new parent — or a new advocate — starting out now.

A conversation about grief, grit, and the power of one person deciding no family should go through this alone.

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