News
Powerful short film from Future Fertility uniquely captures the emotional journey of fertility treatment
The path to parenthood isn’t always as straightforward as one hopes.
A new short film, “The Other Mothers”, created by fertility AI pioneer Future Fertility and digital marketing agency WeThink Nordic, aims to profile the emotional perspectives of patients going through fertility treatments.
“The Other Mothers” builds upon the already growing social movement around patients coming forward to speak out about their experiences, hardships, successes, and failures, helping to normalise discussions about the challenges that hopeful parents endure on their quest to conceive.
WeThink’s concept was guided by a voiceover script penned by a writer who had gone through her own intense fertility, leading to her first child.
Almost by fate, the woman who recorded the spoken voiceover had also undergone IVF treatments and recognised those same feelings reflected in the script.
“Echoing the many posts we’d dug through on online forums, we were touched by the wide range of emotions that such a difficult period brings on and knew that our film had to capture that reality as best as it could,” says Thomas Bo Nielsen, WeThink Nordic’s Creative Director.
“We felt extremely grateful that we were able to materialise our creative concept in a way that’s undoubtedly authentic – which is super important to us when covering a topic that resonates so strongly with a large number of people across the world.”
“Undergoing fertility treatment, whether it’s IVF or egg freezing, is so emotionally and physically taxing, and so many patients carry the mental burden of it alone,” adds Ghita Holst, Partner at WeThink Nordic.
“They often feel uncomfortable about opening up about their experience because it still seems like a taboo subject to talk about in many social circles.”
The film pushes this narrative front and centre, grounding the audience in the emotional pressure experienced by patients undergoing the fertility process and the common feeling that they need to portray a positive disposition for the benefit of others.
“Two pink lines isn’t something we just get.
“We get the uncertainty, the anxiety, the experimenting, the pretending that we’re ‘okay’…that we’re so happy for the women whose path to parenthood turned out differently.”
Beyond the messaging, what makes the film even more impactful is the realism brought to the story via images of actual patients (featuring family, friends, and employees who have gone through the process).
This is strengthened by the participation of Future Fertility’s partner clinics worldwide, who support real patients with these challenges every day.
“There was an incredible sense of community in producing this video,” said Kirsten Anwender, Future Fertility’s Director of Marketing.
“We’re grateful to our patient contributors, who were so generous in entrusting us to share their deeply personal stories with the world.
“Our clinic partners also instantly connected with our vision and were excited to take part. WeThink developed a great concept that truly struck a chord with everyone.”
For fertility patients who were invited to preview the film, the message certainly hit home.
“It’s a really powerful video,” says Heather, one of the film’s IVF patient contributors.
“The first time I saw the final cut, I had to watch it a few times in a row and let the emotions just roll over me.
“It can be so hard to look back at that time because you feel so alone and scared. It was nice to see my experience mirrored and narrated with such care.”
“Like many couples, we didn’t know we would have difficulty conceiving until we tried,” comments Mamiko, another IVF patient who was featured.
“The video captures the overwhelming feeling of uncertainty that impacted many aspects of our lives.”
Two-time IVF mum Ayla reflects: “To me, the video really illustrates the loss of the care-free aspects of conception, the loss of the pleasant “surprise”.
“How you resent having to rely on the science but are also in awe of it and grateful for it.
“How, when you’re lucky enough to end up with a baby in your arms, the differences and discomforts of your journey to get there fade into the background again.”
“The Other Mothers” leaves the audience with a closing message of hope, highlighting the advancements in fertility science and technology that are continuing to improve outcomes and access.
It also honours the tireless, amazing embryologists, providers and clinicians that work diligently to achieve results for their patients.
Future Fertility has been working to close the gaps in fertility science as the first company to provide personalised egg quality assessments for egg freezing and IVF patients, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to analyse images of each individual egg.
“Being patient-centred is very important in fertility care, and as a whole, the industry has quite a long way to go to achieve this fully,” says Nicole Condon, CEO of TRIO Fertility and Founder of EVOLVE Egg Freezing Clinic – both clinics being early adopters of Future Fertility’s technology.
“Patients deserve to be at the centre of their care, and tools like this enable clinics to empower patients with personalised insights so they can be more informed and more engaged in their treatment decisions.”
As the demand for egg freezing and IVF treatments continues to grow globally, advancements in fertility technology can assist clinics in optimising treatments through precision medicine and providing patients with greater access to care by making fertility journeys more efficient.
Australia’s drug advisory committee has recommended wider funding of triptorelin for women with breast cancer or endometriosis.
The recommendation comes after AstraZeneca announced plans to remove Zoladex from the market, risking leaving more than 7,500 women with breast cancer without an alternative treatment.
Both medicines block the release of oestrogen and testosterone and can be used as part of treatment, or for fertility preservation, in some forms of cancer.
The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee met urgently in July and recommended making triptorelin unrestricted under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which would mean it was funded for all uses.
The drug has been listed on the PBS for prostate cancer since 2006.
Triptorelin and Zoladex can also be used to treat endometriosis and to block puberty for either precocious puberty or gender-affirming care.
Vicki Durston, director of policy and advocacy at Breast Cancer Network Australia, described the recommendation as “a significant step forward” and said access to the medicine could mean the difference between life and death for some patients.
She said some women had already chosen to have their ovaries removed because of uncertainty over Zoladex supplies.
Marilla Druitt, Victorian state chair of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said it remained unclear whether triptorelin would work exactly the same way as Zoladex, but the recommendation was likely to be positive for patients with endometriosis and pelvic pain.
She said: “I’m glad we’ve got an alternative.”
“That’s fantastic, and it remains to be seen whether or not it will be as good, but pain is so complex, pain is a really hard thing to study because it’s got so many contributors.”
Druitt said further research would be needed after the medicine was introduced.
If accepted by the federal government, the recommendation would also allow PBS funding of triptorelin for puberty suppression in precocious puberty and gender-affirming care.
This would make gender-affirming care federally funded through the PBS for the first time and would remove a financial barrier for transgender children in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Stuart Aitken, medical director of Gender Health Australia, said the recommendation had sparked “absolute joy” among his patients.
He said: “It takes away a huge barrier to accessing evidence-based care.”
“It means that the ban has a very limited effect.”
By Women’s HealthX
As healthcare organisations navigate tightening compliance mandates, evolving reimbursement frameworks, and shifting health economics, the single most critical asset for leadership is operational visibility into what their industry counterparts are executing right now.
Ahead of the Women’s HealthX marketplace in Boston this December, a cross-functional steering committee of health plans, hospital networks, biopharma innovators, and enterprise employers has launched the definitive 2026 U.S. Health Infrastructure Survey.
The objective of this brief, multi-state index is to bypass abstract market fluff and map out exactly how the country’s elite healthcare stakeholders are practically structuring their 2027 budgets, clinical protocols, and technology procurement guidelines.
Some of the questions we are asking:
- Health Plans & Payers “What is the biggest operational barrier to expanding women’s health coverage?”
- Health Systems & Providers “What is the biggest women’s health priority for health systems over the next 24 months?”
- Pharma & Life Sciences “What is the biggest commercial hurdle facing women’s health innovation?”
- Employers & Benefits Leaders “Which women’s health challenge creates the greatest workforce impact?”
By contributing just 60 seconds of your operational insight to the index, you will ensure your specific sector’s parameters are accurately represented.
In return for your participation, you will secure a priority, pre-ordered copy of the completed 30-page intelligence report when the final data drops this September!
See where your direct peer groups are drawing their line in the sand for the upcoming fiscal year.
Contribute 60 seconds and pre-order your national benchmark report
Women’s HealthX 2026 | From Rhetoric to Results
Encore Boston Harbor | December 3-4 2026
Bypass abstract market rhetoric to evaluate real-world health economics, regulatory compliance mandates, and care delivery systems.
Join the region’s foremost health plan medical directors, hospital COOs, biopharma innovators, and enterprise benefits buyers anchoring our 2026 tracks.
Sahar Abid is a Science Associate at Ema EQ, where she works on cultural sensitivity and bias in AI.
A woman asks an AI health assistant about postpartum depression.
She mentions that her in-laws are telling her to “push through” and skip medical help, even as her symptoms get harder to manage. She never says where she is from or names her background.
The assistant describes the condition and gives her a hotline number. It sounds correct, but it misses what she needs.
That gap is more common than the industry admits, and it points to a blind spot in how we test health AI for bias.
Most bias testing looks at what people explicitly say.
The typical way to check an AI for bias is to label a prompt with someone’s demographic details and see if the answer changes. That catches some problems but misses a bigger one.
Most people do not lead with their identity. They lead with their situation. The woman above told the assistant everything it needed to help her, just not in the form of a label.
Her real question was not only “what is postpartum depression?” It was “how do I get care when the people around me don’t want me to?
When family members hold sway over health decisions, and in many communities they do, advice that asks someone to overrule their family is not something they can act on.
The AI didn’t say anything factually wrong. It answered a different question than the one she was living.
We call this culturally implicit bias, meaning the AI misses the cultural context a situation implies rather than the context a person spells out.
When systems are trained to notice only the explicit cues, they fall back on a default answer built for the majority. For everyone else, the response can feel generic, off-target, or discouraging enough that they stop looking for help.
In health, that is not small. The people most likely to be missed are often the ones the system already underserves.
What we set out to test.
At Ema, we wanted to know how well AI picks up on cultural context that is implied but never stated. So we built our own way to test for it, across a range of communities and real situations like postpartum depression and fertility, using questions that carried cultural meaning without announcing it.
The patterns were consistent. Models often missed the meaning underneath the question. They dropped the specific details a person did share and smoothed them into something generic.
And even when they pointed toward real care, they tended to offer one option instead of choices that might actually fit a person’s life. Any one of those can be the difference between someone following the advice and walking away from care.
Why this matters for anyone building health AI.
Getting this right is the right thing to do, and it also works better.
When an answer reflects a person’s real context, people trust and act on the recommendations more, so they get the help and support they need.
Testing for it is harder than the shortcut most teams use. Swapping a name or a demographic label in and out is easy. Checking whether a model actually understands the human context around a question takes more care.
The shortcut teaches models to perform cultural competence instead of practicing it. No matter how much or how little someone chooses to share, they deserve an answer that is warm, complete, and usable.
A better question.
The bar for equitable health AI should be “does it serve someone who never told you who they are?” It is the harder test, but it determines whether real people get help.
The work of getting there is far from finished, and it is exactly what we are building toward at Ema.
Sources: Naidoo, V., & Chadha, K. K. (2025), Culturally responsive AI chatbots: from framework to field evidence, Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. Souligne, N., & Subbian, V. (2026), FairLogue: A toolkit for intersectional fairness analysis in clinical machine learning models.
Entrepreneur1 week agoApplications close August 18 for Women’s Health Innovation Summit 2026 Innovation Showcase
Menopause1 week agoThird of women unaware of perimenopause mental health impact
Entrepreneur2 weeks agoWomen’s Health Week Europe 2026 releases fully populated agenda ahead of October summit
Fertility5 days agoChelsea FC Women to launch first-of-its-kind player fertility fund
Menopause1 week agoMenopausal hormone therapy may lower dementia risk, study suggests
Hormonal health2 weeks agoWe are wrapping our children in plastic and calling it care
Pregnancy1 week agoChemicals in plastics may be linked to high blood pressure during pregnancy
News2 weeks agoWomen with endometriosis face 46% higher risk of type 2 diabetes – study
2 Comments