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You are listening to As A Woman Episode 105, single mother by choice with KDB.

In this episode I'm talking all about the decision to become a single mom by choice and how I love this group.

Welcome to As A Woman, the podcast hosted by fertility physician Dr. Natalie Crawford to educate and empower women.

Each week learn about your health, your fertility and how they relate to your true self.

Become a part of the community fostering collaboration over competition while learning how to authentically find your voice and amplify others as a woman.

Hey friends, welcome back to the podcast. This episode may be one of the top requested episodes and I'm so honored to have Katie Bryan on the podcast today.

I have no Katie for quite a while. She is a single mom by choice who went through a really interesting and complicated fertility journey trying to figure out what was best for her.

And she came to sit in front of me one time and I asked her, what is your goal? What are you trying to do? And she took that into this amazing journey.

And also she now hosts the single greatest choice podcast and she is a coach and an advocate for single women who are worried about their biological clock or considering whether solo motherhood is the right path for them.

This is a passion project for Katie all trying to help educate and empower women earlier in their journeys.

Single women can find support, empowerment information and inspiration around their fertility and Katie hopes that all the stories she shares helps give other women courage.

I'm so honored to have her on the podcast today and I think you're really going to love her story.

Katie, thank you so much for coming on the as a woman podcast to share your story single mom by choice. This topic has been so highly requested and so I'm thrilled to have you here.

Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be the single mother by choice that you're talking to.

So you became, you know, one of my most memorable patients and I always tell people this.

It is not necessarily a good thing if you're memorable, it means your journey hasn't been easy because if you have a very easy journey, I don't actually get to know you very well, but it's when something hasn't quite gone as smooth as possible.

That we get to develop this really close relationship so it's always a it's bad for you, but in the end, it's good for me because we really get to know each other through it and I want to just start at the beginning for everybody who doesn't know and I'm sure a lot of people will catch back up on your story through your own podcast, but when did you decide I'm ready to do this on my own because I don't think that is a decision that most women see coming.

Right, and I don't think I saw it coming either. I can't really pinpoint a decision point for myself. I think it kind of happened gradually.

So when I first started looking into fertility issues and infertility preservation, I was in no way thinking single mother by choice.

In fact, I for the first time in a long time felt really hopeful that that was not something that I was even going to need to consider because I was in a brand new relationship.

So I had I was 36 at the time, almost 37 had just met someone. It felt very different and very much like this could be the person, but I wanted to make sure that I could give it the time that it needed to develop and that there wasn't a lot of pressure on the relationship.

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