Twelve years ago, when Amy Mohon Bengfort and her wife decided they wanted to have their first kid through reproductive technology, the experience felt isolating.
“When we started thinking about that, we were the first in our group to have kids, and we didn’t know any other same-sex couples who had gone through this so we really didn’t know what we were doing.”
She says at the time, there wasn’t a lot of information out there and that they ended up having to figure out a lot of the fertility journey on their own, later finding “a fantastic OB-GYN” to help them along their journey.
“I just felt like that part of the health system, I just wanted to give that experience to other people because of the experience we had going through it,” Mohon Bengfort says. “I think we were just really lucky in the people that we came across, and so it just kind of became something that I wanted to do.”
She decided to start as a doula, after previously working as an overnight ER nurse for about eight years.
“It kind of felt like an easier segway because I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to school yet, and then after that, I think for me, since my background was medical anyway, I wanted to be more of the provider role and make the decisions and not just the support role, which is really more of what a doula is.”
Mohon Bengfort and her wife, Lindsey, already had two children when she decided to go back to school. She earned her master’s in nursing and became a certified nurse midwife at the same time as having two more children.
“I look at our four kids that we have, and I think about how we conceived them and the help that we had, and it’s hard not to want to just give that back,” she says. “And I want my kids to know that I worked hard … I want them to kind of see the value of the sacrifices that they had to make and that I had to make in order for me to get here.”
She came across her current role as an advanced practice RN at a fertility center, where the physician she now works with, who is also in the LGBTQ+ community, had previously done an evaluation on her about a decade ago.
Photography by Jehadu Abshiro
“We are, as our team, we have 75% of our providers are in the community, so two of our physicians, myself, and then we have an additional nurse practitioner who’s heterosexual, but I think it kind of creates a safe space for the community because they know we’ve already been through it, and you do feel like when people come in, I think even still, sometimes you kind of wait, you kind of feel it out as to whether, ‘OK, do I disclose?’ Do I just say, ‘Oh, you know, my partner?’ Do I want to say that I have a wife? Is this like an environment where that’s like an OK thing? And I do feel like when I have a same-sex couple, I always kind of make an effort to be like, ‘OK, my wife and I went through this as well,’ and you can kind of see that body language of relief.”
Not only does Mohon Bengfort’s role help support other LGBTQ+ individuals seeking fertility treatments like she did, but she also finds value in working in a profession that examines women’s health.
“I think that women’s health as a whole, we’re just not there. The research isn’t there, the protections aren’t there. I think it’s an important role,” she says. “It’s important to have females in this role because ultimately we need to have presence to help keep these things safe and keep moving forward and breaking down barriers.”
