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Welcome to As A Woman, Fertility Hormones and Beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Natalie Crawford, and I am a board certified OBGYN and fertility physician, and also co-founder of Four Fertility in Austin, Texas.

Each week on this podcast, I discuss health and fertility, and how they relate to your true self.

Become a part of the community of collaboration that amplifies others as a woman. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Hello and welcome back to the As A Woman podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Natalie Crawford. I'm a board certified OBGYN and REI. I'm a fertility doctor.

Today, I want to talk about one question I can ask all the time, and that is, should I do genetic testing with IVF?

Now, first of all, should I do genetic testing? That in of itself leads to so much confusion on what are you testing?

What is it for? What other testing is there? Because honestly, the word is so all-encompassing.

So I'm going to break down the difference in preconception and pre-implantation and then post-conception testing what those are.

But really, I'm going to talk about some of the reasons why if you're doing IVF, you may want to consider or not consider genetic testing.

I'm going to put a huge disclaimer here. The fertility field is often rooted in a lot of paternalism, as is all women's health.

The reason why I'm even saying that at a minute one in a podcast is because a lot of times doctors make assumptions about what you want to do or what you don't want to do, what you can handle or what you can't handle, what you can afford, or what you cannot afford.

Those things are often made without you even being aware and they get influenced into what a person is telling you because they are making assumptions.

Now, their assumptions may well be right, but often they don't really know your true priority and your goals unless you are talking about that.

They are assuming you have certain goals and your goals may be different and I will break some of those down as we go.

So it doesn't mean that your doctor may be wrong if they're saying one thing or another, but you have to be the advocate and make sure if they're not asking the question, you're giving them the answer.

Meaning, what's your goal? What is the big picture? What's important to you? What can you handle? And importantly, what can you not? We all have boundaries.

So I'm not saying one way is right or wrong, but I'm saying you should be the one dictating those parameters and at least being presented the choices.

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