Creators are drawing big audiences sharing their intensely personalmedical journeys through IVF and egg-freezing. It’s helping themafford a shot at a family they might not otherwise have.

By Alexandra S. Levine, Forbes Staff

Caitlyn O’Neil suffered her first miscarriage in February 2020. When the pandemic hit weeks later, she began using TikTok, where she was surprised to find content on little-discussed topics like pregnancy loss, infertility and other challenges getting or staying pregnant. But the more she saw others posting their stories, the more inspired she was to start sharing her own.

O’Neil made her first TikTok about the miscarriage in March 2020. In September, after medical testing determined it would be nearly impossible to conceive again naturally (as she had with her first child), she announced on TikTok she’d be undergoing in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, a process where sperm and egg are mixed in a lab and then inserted into a woman’s uterus to try to make a baby. By October, she was unboxing$5,000 of IVF medications for a fast-growing audience and taking viewers inside the exam room at her first vaginal ultrasound. “This is our first, and hopefully only, IVF cycle,” she told them. (They’d saved enough to cover just one round, she told Forbes, which costs about $20,000 where O’Neil lives in Michigan.)

In November, as she posted daily videos giving herself at-home hormone shots to stimulate egg growth, her TikTok following nearly doubled. It surged again as she broadcast her egg retrieval—donning a hospital gown and hairnet, with an IV in her arm and a fistful of crackers post-anesthesia. When they harvested 13 eggs, four of which were successfully fertilized and became embryos, she posted a video of the final step of the process, panning an ultrasound screen that showed just where in her uterus the doctor would implant them.

“I’m officially one day past transfer, and I am considered PUPO… Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise!” she said in a November 28 post liked more than 20,000 times.

When a December blood test confirmed that, she again shared the news on TikTok.

But by the end of the month, she’d lost another pregnancy.

“There is no heartbeat and no more growth,” she told her TikTok audience, which by then numbered 150,000.“Today we are broken. Today we are crushed. Today we are grieving. This is miscarriage. This is infertility. But we will try again. We are not giving up.”

In the new year, after chronicling another attempt with their two remaining embryos, O’Neil and her husband failed to get pregnant. Without the funds to give IVF another go, she told followers they were figuring out how to raise the money needed to continue.

The post went viral, and small donations, mostly $1 to $5, began pouring into the Venmo, PayPal and GoFundMe listed in O’Neil’s TikTok bio. Within a day, strangers on TikTok had covered all $20,000 for another cycle, O’Neil told Forbes . “It was the most surreal experience,” she said. “Because of social media and sharing our story, we were able to go on to do a second round.”

She gained even more traction on TikTok as she shared their subsequent journey—more than doubling the size of her following again, she said. Then, later that fall, she began landing lucrative brand deals for products ranging “from a vacuum to prenatals.” When their second round of IVF was unsuccessful, those paid partnerships—a $40,000 collab with a water bottle brand, for example—enabled them to pay for a third and fourth.

In total, it took the couple 2.5 years of IVF, including four egg retrievals and seven transfers, to have their son, who they joke is their “six-figure baby.”

“We would not have been able to, financially, without that income,” said O’Neil, who today has a combined audience of nearly 1 million on TikTok and Instagram. But it hasn’t been without criticism from some TikTokers who’ve questioned her actions, accusing her of using followers’ donations for travel instead of IVF (an allegation O’Neil has forcefully denied) and arguing that these creators are exploiting or glorifying women’s painful, deeply personal experiences for financial gain.

“It just blows my mind that people get upset about the monetizing piece, because it’s like, this is my trauma and this is my story—I don’t know why it hurts you if I am able to make money and provide for my family by sharing my story,” O’Neil, now 33, told Forbes . “I mean, people write books. Should they not write books about their story or about their life and profit off of that? It just seems a bit hypocritical, and I think people just focus on it because it’s social media.”

“I try to remind people I’m, like, the most average person. I am your average mom in an average city in an average state—I truly am,” she added. “It all started with good reason. … It wasn’t about making a quick buck. I had no idea all of the opportunities I would get from social media when I started this. No idea.”

The business of baby-making

Caitlyn O’Neil is just one of a fast-growing collective of women amassing massive followings on TikTok and Instagram by sharing the most intimate details of their fertility and #ttc (“trying to conceive”) journeys on social media—from IVF, egg-freezing and surrogacy to family-building in same-sex couples. Where traditional lifestyle influencers post fashion finds, beauty routines and travel logs, IVF influencers are discussing egg retrievals, egg-freezing, embryo transfers, their medical diagnoses, how long they’ve been trying to get pregnant and the financial and psychological strain they endure. And they’re doing so despite today’s post-Roe v. Wade political minefield: Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that frozen IVF embryos are human children understate law, and just last month, Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would guarantee the right to IVF nationwide. That’s made some creators targets of harassment from viewers demanding to know what they’ll do with the eggs they do not use.

For many of these women, the goal has been destigmatizing and raising awareness about fertility struggles, as well as finding or creating a supportive community during an intensely isolating experience that can be physically and emotionally taxing. But it has also brought in money—in the form of partnerships, commissions, discounts, donations or other incentives—making fertility care more affordable at a time when a single round of IVF can cost north of $30,000 in some parts of the country and elective fertility procedures are generally not covered by insurance. Because creators are largely self-employed and without baseline company health benefits, monetizing their journey can for some mean the difference between having a family and not.

“If you were a viewer watching it, it almost felt serialized, like a show.”

Interest in the baby-making market is only growing: Investors have poured at least $23 billion into technology focused on women’s reproductive health and biological needs, a vertical known as “femtech” that’s projected to generate $3 billion by 2030, according to PitchBook (everything from ovulation trackers to AI that seeks to transform the IVF process). Employers are slowly starting to offer fertility-related work perks . Women, whether they consider themselves influencers or simply “IVF Warriors,” are talking about these subjects, once considered taboo, more openly on social media. And despite some backlash over the ethics and optics of paying internet stars to promote high stakes health procedures, sometimes without disclosing it, startups and healthcare providers alike are beginning to see these collaborations as helpful to their businesses.

Startups are increasingly leaning on niche creators and influencers in the space to drive growth—seeing in them unusually high engagement rates that several creators attributed to their stories having a narrative arc that can feel like reality TV. “If you were a viewer watching it, it almost felt serialized, like a show,” said 30-year-old TikToker Demi Schweers, who began IVF at CNY Fertility in Buffalo after a miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy (with the baby growing outside the uterus) that led to the removal of a fallopian tube.

In sharing the real-time progression from that low to the high of a successful birth, “you were going back everyday and something new was happening and you were going through this journey as well.” Now, with a two-month-old and two million followers, Schweers has transitioned into creating content about being a new mom, partnering with brands like Frida Baby and using hashtags like #momsoftiktok.

“They’ve built devout followings of women that are so invested in their stories, and the psychology of that is so fascinating and just so different from a lifestyle influencer posting about a new pair of jeans.”

Cofertility, a startup that gives women the option to freeze their eggs for free by donating half of however many are retrieved to another family in need, has partnered with creators across several platforms because “we spend our time anywhere [our members] are, and TikTok is a big part of that, Instagram is a big part of that, podcasts are a big part of that,” said CEO Lauren Makler. “That’s how this generation is getting their information.”

Gaia, which aims to ease the financial burden of IVF by covering most treatment costs upfront and having users pay them back only once they’ve successfully had a child, enlisted creators in the fertility community to help promote its U.S. launch in June. And Dandi Fertility , which provides both an “IVF care kit” and an online platform where women can seek live help from nurses during the injection process, has relied on grassroots ambassadors impacted by infertility to help build the brand. CEO Jake Kent said they have driven 40 percent of sales since the company launched in May . (Ambassadors are not paid to post but earn a 10 to 20 percent commission on sales they drive.)

“They’ve built devout followings of women that are so invested in their stories, and the psychology of that is so fascinating and just so different from a lifestyle influencer posting about a new pair of jeans,” Kent said.

“Where there’s an explosion in fertility patients—and there’s an explosion of women turning to egg-freezing[because of things like] benefits and delayed family-building—there’s going to be an explosion of people looking for their stories on TikTok and Instagram,” Kent added. “And I think it’s kind of just the beginning.”

Clinics, creators and collabs

Fertility clinics eager to reach a new generation of patients are starting to work with creators and influencers, too. RMA of New York, which is affiliated with the Mount Sinai Health System, recently performed IVF and egg-freezing for large-scale fashion and lifestyle influencers who posted throughout the process and regularly tagged the doctor and clinic. An RMA spokesperson told Forbes it has not comped or discounted procedures for influencers but would not say whether it compensated them in other ways. Spring Fertility, part of a national network, did an egg-freezing giveaway with another influencer—who after chronicling her own journey chose to donate a cycle to one of her followers—and has provided creators with $150 discount codes to share with followers for first-time patient consults. Spring Fertility did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

HRC Fertility, an affiliate of USC’s Keck Medicine that has clinics throughout California, has partnered with influencers across the state. Dr. Rachel Mandelbaum, an obstetrician-gynecologist and reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialist at HRC’s Los Angeles offices, said she views this as an important way for practices to both reach and educate potential patients, and to showcase the doctors’ high quality of care. The terms of those collaborations vary from case to case, she said, but none of her patients have been given free care and it’s up to influencers how much they want to share.

“We respect and honor the sanctity of this process and leave it to the individual [to decide] what they feel comfortable sharing,” Dr. Mandelbaum said. “That’s part of what the consumer has to remember, too, when they’re watching somebody go through a fertility journey—that everything is through this lens, so they may choose to share certain parts, not other parts. That’s sort of the check on all of social media that we have to put on it.”

And “we have to respect that we’re talking about someone’s health,” she added. “When it comes to our healthcare, it is a very different thing than a pair of shoes or a bag that influencers might otherwise get for discounted rates for publicizing them.”

Despite the good intentions and awareness raising, some view clinics’ potential paid partnerships with influencers as problematic, especially when such financial relationships are not clearly disclosed as required by the Federal Trade Commission. Anonymous critics debating the topic on one Reddit thread described it as “dystopian AF,” “like a Black Mirror episode,” “so unethical” and “seriously wrong.”

“This cannot be viewed as ‘information is power’ when there is most certainly a financial incentive for their decision to share—whether it be free services or a split commission based on future patients referred by said influencer,” one Redditor commented.

More took issue with “shilling” egg-freezing because it’s a procedure women can be more “influenced” to pursue proactively (IVF, on the other hand, is for many couples a last resort). “It’s making 19-year-old girls think they need to freeze their eggs the way they need the latest Dyson Air Wrap,” one Redditor wrote, referencing a $600 cult-fad blow dryer.

“They also aren’t sensitive AT ALL to the fact that the vast majority of women can’t accessit,” another said. It’s just reinforcing so many divisions around classism, I can’t.” But Dr. Mandelbaum sees influencers having public conversations about egg-freezing as hugely positive. “It opens people’s eyes to the options that exist for building your family,” she told
Forbes . “So many times people live their life, they wait for the right partner to come around, and then they put off egg-freezing, whereas when they see a young influencer who’s pursuing egg-freezing because they want to focus on their career and delay child care, then it makes one think, ‘Okay, this isn’t something that’s associated only with not finding your partner,’” she said. “It’s something that people should be proud of.”

Blurring ethical boundaries

In addition to the lack of transparency around who might be benefiting and how money is changing hands, and the blurring of ethical lines in the doctor-patient relationship, there are also concerns over basic trust and whether women desperate for results are being taken advantage of.

TikToker Leah Marie began fertility treatment in 2023. She delays her posts by one month so she can protect herself and allow time to process challenges like a recent failed IVF cycle.

Leah Marie Royal, a 37-year-old creator near Philadelphia, has grown an audience of 27,000 on TikTok sharing her path through male-factor infertility (issues with the partner’s sperm). She said that one clinic in her area—where she was not a patient and had never been treated—asked her to promote their IVF services in exchange for money. She turned it down. “I have to truly like the brand, value the brand and know what I’m putting out,” she said of the partnerships she takes on. “I’m not gonna create a story when I’ve never stepped foot into the clinic.”

Last November, Xinyue “Tracey” Chang, an influencer with 4 million followers, sued a California fertility clinic for allegedly running a promotional video pretending she was their patient, using footage from her social media and an unrelated fertility center in London to endorse them. (She subsequently dropped the suit and did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Dear god, we’re not hawking off our favorite vitamins or skincare products, folks. … I love social media as much as the next person, but I just think we’re getting into sketchy territory.”

Creator Kayde Mason, who has drawn 134,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram documenting her life as a surrogate and egg donor, detailed a similar phenomenon after a well-known surrogacy agency, which connects families with women who’ll carry their babies, offered her $1,600 to post a 15-second video promoting them. The catch: Mason had never worked with the agency before.

“This is so much bigger than even offering a referral bonus structure; I’d be using my power—as a content creator, as a previous surrogate [and] somewhat trusted voice in this world—to recruit you, to advertise you to sign up with an agency that in reality, I know nothing about, and let’s be clear, this has been happening for awhile,” she said in a video from 2022 . “Dear god, we’re not hawking off our favorite vitamins or skin care products, folks. … I love social media as much as the next person, but I just think we’re getting into sketchy territory.” (The FTC prohibits influencers from promoting products they have not tried. Mason did not respond toa request for comment.)

After creator Destene Sudduth’s years long journey through IVF, she is expecting her first baby next month.

Destene Sudduth , a 33-year-old creator in Dallas who has documented her yearslong journey through IVF on TikTok and Instagram, where she now has a combined 4.5 million followers, said that while she hasn’t seen that kind of exploitation, she understands where some of the broader criticism is coming from and can empathize.

“There’s always the cost: They’re like, ‘Well, you guys are rich, you’re social media creators so you’ve got the money’—which is, to a certain extent, kind of true. You can’t really be mad at it,” she said. “Creators always get scrutiny just because the money is just so different from a nine-to-five.”

But her goal has been to normalize people of color going through fertility issues and to ultimately have a baby of her own, and “we don’t know how it would have worked out had we not been creators and had the luxury of brand deals that were really high, some in the five figures, to really help sustain this journey,” she said. “Being a  creator took the pressure off tremendously… and that was just a real big blessing.” Sudduth is today almost nine months pregnant, expecting her first baby in mid-August.

Still, not everyone makes substantial money off their IVF sagas—and for TikTok creator Brittney Zirkle, that hasn’t made sharing the journey any less valuable.

Following four IVF cycles and three egg retrievals across Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, TikToker Brittney Zirkle is now 22 weeks pregnant with her first, a baby girl.

Zirkle is an army veteran who was diagnosed with unexplained infertility after serving in Iraq and becoming a labor and delivery nurse in Pensacola, Florida. When she finally got pregnant through intrauterine insemination—with triplets—she lost the high-risk pregnancy at seven weeks and nearly died. She gave up her dream job as a neonatal nurse “because it was too hard to even see a baby,” she said in an interview as she began to cry. “I accomplished my dream, and it’s kind of sad because I didn’t get to be a mom, and that’s what stopped me at that point.”

After silently dealing with that trauma and a host of medical issues that followed, Zirkle began IVF as a single mom by choice at 30 and documented it on TikTok. She’s built an audience of 127,000 and said she has gotten some hate for it. But following four IVF cycles and three egg retrievals across three states (Louisiana, Alabama and Florida), the 32-year-old is now married, healthy and 22 weeks pregnant.

It was “two straight years of every other day getting an ultrasound, a fertility clinic, taking this pill or this shot, thousands of needles… I got on TikTok because for so long, I kept silent, no one really knew how hard it was to go through,” she said, emphasizing how many women are also going through this, in secret, on their own. “Why are we suffering in silence? Like, people have cancer, people have all these diseases, diabetes, they talk about—there’s groups, there’s communities—why is infertility shunned and looked down upon?”

Her first baby is due the day before Thanksgiving.