our nonprofit mission

• Call to Action

  Women’s pre-pregnancy health is accepted as central to optimizing the odds for pregnancy safety and maternal child health (MCH) outcomes. Meanwhile, the importance of men’s preconception health is less familiar to the general public, healthcare providers, and insurers, despite being known to help – or harm – pregnancy and birth outcomes. Could traditional preconception health campaigns be expanded to include intimate partners, each with their own evidence-based supports?

• Better Odds

  The mission of the Preconception Education Partnership (PEP) is to elevate the role of future fathers and sperm health (including donors) while simultaneously centering the well-being of people who could become pregnant. Coalition-building could make this even stronger.

• Global Impact

  The global impact of prioritizing both partners’ reproductive healthcare more than doubles, since the pool of prospective fathers is always larger than prospective mothers. Vast economic benefits result from equitable preventive care before first impregnations or pregnancies, especially if high-risk unplanned pregnancies decrease.

• Familiarity Breeds Confidence

  PEP’s most innovative health literacy resource under development, the PartnerPepTalk, advocates for biological, psychological, and social supports for preconception readiness. The PartnerPepTalk online hub will be a model for communication that is first initiated between pediatricians and pre-adolescent patients and is repeated annually. The team approach to healthcare is introduced and reinforced at every touchpoint. The PartnerPepTalk is an “ice-breaker” to spark self-reflection on one’s reproductive life plan, promote conversations with one’s intimate partner(s), seek baseline healthcare (or optimize care of chronic medical conditions), and explore community support for food insecurity, alcohol and/or substance use disorders, smoking cessation, mental health, intimate partner violence, and other high-impact wrap-around services. LGBTQ+ or couples impacted by infertility or prior loss will find specially tailored PartnerPepTalk ice-breakers and vetted referral links.

• Framework and Funding

  Maternal-child health (MCH) crises are only partially explained by acute prenatal (pregnancy) and postpartum circumstances. To minimize biased conclusions, PEP advocates for approximately 25% of MCH attention to generational epigenetic forces that exist months, years, and generations before impregnation/conception, with the remaining 50% and 25% scrutiny on pregnancy and postpartum factors. Something as simple as this soft guideline, “25% preconception: 50% prenatal: 25% postpartum subject matter,” better explains inequities in maternal and infant mortality and complication rates. Journalists, researchers, policy influencers, educators, and clinicians can all help normalize addressing the full arch of pregnancy and birth outcome stories. Funding is needed for more research, civil discourse, and reporting on MCH crises that fully frame the issue.

• Fresh Opportunities

  Deliverables include PartnerPepTalk social media campaigns, catchy posters and brochures, and newer innovations created for and by tomorrow’s generation of parents from Gen Y, Z, and Alpha. PEP welcomes opportunities to co-develop and co-brand deliverables with mission-aligned partners.

• Reproductive Health Equity

  To complement the re-shaping of healthcare equity for future generations, we prioritize representation of historically marginalized populations who bear the disproportionate burden of health disparities.

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