Elizabeth Day: Fertility, failure and unexpected grief
Friendship Therapy
Emma Reed Turrell
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
TW: miscarriage, abortion and fertility struggles
Welcome back to Dial Emma! Each week, I'll be answering your dilemmas with honesty, empathy, and a few therapeutic truth bombs to help you make sense of life's stickiest moments. If you've ever wished you had a therapist in your back pocket, Dial Emma is here to help.
This week's dilemma comes from a listener who is navigating a complex and painful fertility journey - but not one that necessarily fits into our pre-conceived ideas of what fertility struggles *should* look and feel like. To help me answer it, I'm joined by my first special guest: author and podcaster Elizabeth Day.
Our listener, 43, writes with extraordinary vulnerability about her unexpected pregnancy in 2023, the decision to terminate, and the heartbreak of multiple miscarriages that followed. While her partner’s desire for parenthood has since waned, her own longing has grown, and she now finds herself grieving something she never expected to want so deeply.
This is a conversation about grief, identity, truth, and the emotional complexities of fertility, especially when the path isn’t linear. Elizabeth also shares her personal experiences of miscarriage and fertility treatment, and how she found peace on the other side of her decision to stop pursuing biological motherhood.
If you have a dilemma for Emma, please fill out this form.
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Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.
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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | lunch time time to get my macro in the microwave |
| 0:03.0 | kitchen banter afoot if in doubt join in |
| 0:07.0 | oh hey jim you listen to comedy on audible too |
| 0:11.6 | yeah so funny yeah what's your favourite title |
| 0:17.2 | the comedy comedian show that's not a real show, is it, Jim? Get in on the jokes, |
| 0:25.7 | with comedy on Audible. Subscription requires the audible.com. UK for terms. |
| 0:31.2 | Hello and welcome to Dial Emma, the podcast where your dilemmas meet my therapeutic insights. |
| 0:37.8 | I'm Emma Reid-Torrell, psychotherapist, author, and well-recovering people-pleaser. |
| 0:42.4 | Each week, I'll be unpacking real-life questions from listeners just like you. |
| 0:46.9 | The big ones, the small ones, the ones that keep you up at night, |
| 0:50.5 | offering practical tools and gentle truths to help you find your way through. |
| 0:55.3 | So if you've got a question, you don't know how to ask out loud. |
| 0:58.7 | You've come to the right place. |
| 1:07.3 | Welcome to this week's episode of Dial Emma. |
| 1:10.3 | And it's, well, it's a turn-up for the books |
| 1:12.4 | because it's the first episode that I'm doing with my expert guest. |
| 1:18.2 | Well, with a guest anyway. |
| 1:19.9 | And I felt like I had to. |
| 1:21.9 | In fact, there was only one person that I could possibly ask to become my, my virgin guest. |
| 1:28.3 | I hope that's okay to say. |
| 1:31.0 | Because she is the OG of my joyful podcasting career. |
| 1:37.4 | She was my co-creator and co-host Best Friend Therapy. |
... |
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