We Built Families Out Loud Because No One Prepared Us for What Came After
When we started building our family, we did not think we were unprepared. We are two dads who did the reading, asked the questions, and found a reproductive endocrinologist we genuinely trusted. And here is the part we want to say clearly, up front, because so much fertility content gets this wrong: our doctor was extraordinary. He is the reason our twin boys are here. He took thoughtful, calculated risks, and he told us about those risks honestly before we made any decision.
We would make the same medical choices again.
What we were not ready for was everything that came after the positive test. Our boys arrived early and spent two months in the NICU. Nobody had walked us through what that experience actually feels like from the inside: the monitors, the alarms at 3 a.m., the impossible math of dividing yourself between two isolettes, the guilt that has no logical basis and visits you anyway. We had been prepared, carefully, for the medicine. We had not been prepared for the meaning of it.
That gap, the space between "the treatment worked" and "we are okay," is where Families Out Loud was born.
The thing no one tells you about a "successful" outcome
There is a story the culture tells about fertility treatment, and it ends the moment the baby arrives. Roll credits. Happy family. But anyone who has lived a complicated birth, a NICU stay, or a hard postpartum knows the story does not end there. Success and struggle are not opposites. They sat in the same hospital room with us, at the same time, every single day.
This is not a failure of medicine. It is a failure of preparation. The clinical side of assisted reproduction in the United States has gotten remarkably good. What has not kept pace is the honest, human conversation about what families should expect emotionally and practically once treatment succeeds. The American Psychiatric Association reports that up to 40% of women experiencing infertility have a psychiatric diagnosis, most often depression or anxiety, and that one study found fewer than 7% of people ever sought psychiatric help for it. (American Psychiatric Association) The medicine shows up. The support does not always show up with it.
Why we chose education instead of anger
It would have been easy to come out of the NICU angry, looking for someone to blame. We did not, because blame would have been dishonest. The honest version is more useful anyway: good people working inside a fast-moving system do not always have time to prepare families for the full arc of what they are about to live. The appointments are short. The information arrives in fragments. The emotional and logistical realities get squeezed out by the clinical ones, not out of malice, but out of bandwidth.
So we asked a different question. If this happened to us, two informed, resourced, stubbornly proactive people, how many other families were quietly navigating the same blind spots? How many were spending money they did not need to spend? How many were carrying a trauma nobody had named for them? How many were blaming themselves for outcomes that were never fully explained?
Families Out Loud is our answer. We are a community and a traveling conference built to give intended parents the full picture before they need it, not after. We bring together the best of this field, reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists, attorneys, mental health professionals, surrogacy and donor agencies, and real parents who have lived it, into one intimate room, and we talk honestly about all of it.
Families Out Loud brings honest, jargon-free family-building education to six cities in 2026 — with the experts in the room to answer your questions. One $40 weekend ticket.
What "ethical" actually means to us
We use the word ethical a lot, and we mean something specific by it. Every organization that sponsors a Families Out Loud event is vetted against the ethics standards of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and SEEDS, the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy. We will not put an intended parent in front of an organization we would not have trusted with our own journey. That is not a marketing line. It is the entire point. The thing that makes us different from other family-building conferences is that we are not a marketplace that sells booth space to anyone with a checkbook. We are a curated, inclusive room.
That matters because trust is the scarcest resource in this space. When you are spending tens of thousands of dollars and staking your future family on a set of strangers, "who can I actually trust" is the only question that matches the stakes.
You belong in this conversation
Since those two months in the NICU, we have met hundreds of intended parents: gay dads like us, lesbian couples, heterosexual couples who spent years in silence, single parents by choice, trans and non-binary parents building families on their own terms. The details differ. The need does not. Everyone deserves to walk into this process informed, supported, and unafraid to ask the hard question.
Silence cost us peace we cannot get back. Education is how we make sure it costs you less. That is why this community exists, and we are genuinely glad you found it.
Families Out Loud is a nonprofit family-building community and traveling conference, founded by Mike Snaric and George Moore out of their own family-building journey. We make the path to parenthood safer, clearer, and more humane.
