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Making More Humans is a physician-led curriculum covering reproduction, relationships, consent, puberty, and sex education for families — clinically accurate, shame-free, and designed for every age.
So your kids grow up with the knowledge to stay safe, make informed decisions, and understand the body they’ll live in their whole life.
[music] I want to tell you about a patient of mine who almost died because of what she'd been taught about her own body. She was young, recently married, and beyond excited about her first positive pregnancy test. I was the first person she told, even before her husband. She was just absolutely over the moon.
And then she started having pelvic pain. When they did an ultrasound, they found it was an ectopic pregnancy. It was in the fallopian tube. This is a dangerous situation and can cause the tube to rupture and become life-threatening for the mother.
And the pregnancy can definitely not survive in there. There is nothing a fallopian tube has that an embryo needs to develop. The treatment is really straightforward. A medication to end the pregnancy in the tube before the tube ruptures.
Doctors do this all the time. She refused. Her husband refused. They both refused completely.
And the OBGYN's office could not convince them. This was not stubbornness. This was not stupidity. These were two people who had been taught very thoroughly, very deliberately, that any kind of pregnancy termination was causing pain and suffering for a baby.
And they believed it because no one had ever told them anything different. That is what happens when sex education is not teaching the clinical truth. It isn't just leaving gaps. It's stilling those gaps with something else.
And sometimes what fills them can kill you. I'll tell you how that story ends, but first I need to explain something about how we talk about sex ed, because there's a word people keep using that I think is completely wrong. As I've been talking with colleagues in the online education world about my human reproduction program, Making More Humans, everyone loves the title. Everyone loves Making More Humans and that it's a doctor who's gonna be teaching this and that it's gonna be factual and not centered on sex, but centered on science because that's something we can all get behind.
None of us want our kids growing up thinking that the whole point of life is to be able to have sex and reproduce. We don't wanna focus on the sex act as being the thing that defines maturity. We can all agree we want a broader, more scientific understanding of human reproduction. And then we want our kids to have the information they need in order to stay safe and have a good life.
And then we start getting into some of the details and I start hearing, but you aren't gonna talk about this, right? And you aren't gonna talk about that, right? They want what many people call a neutral curriculum. Neutral isn't the right word.
What people usually mean is sanitized, stripped of the parts that actually keep kids safe. We're making it watered down and weak and bland and without substance in order to not offend anybody. But that is not neutral. That is avoiding the truth.
That is avoiding the clinical reality. It's teaching our kids things that make us a little bit uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as other things. And the problem is, is that our kids are gonna have to face a lot of very uncomfortable stuff in their lives. If we teach them from the beginning that we can't talk about this stuff, and then this stuff happens, they're not prepared.
They're not prepared for the reality of life. A lot of people think about this on a moral spectrum. There's the moral view of sex ed, there's the immoral view of sex ed, and then somewhere in the middle is what they're calling the neutral view of sex ed. But I don't think morals are where we need to be talking when we talk about something that's biological.
We need to stop here for a second because I know some of you just thought, oh, here we go, she's one of those people, she's gonna tell me that morals don't matter and my kids can do whatever they want. So let me tell you who I actually am. I am Christian. My family is very active in our church which belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
My husband and my younger child both sing in choirs, play hand bells. My husband drives the van once a month to pick up seniors who need rides from nursing homes. My younger child plays violin in the church instrumental ensemble and plays solos whenever there's a need. My son focuses on the tech, the sound and live streaming every week.
I've always felt very strongly that every person is valuable and made exactly how God intended them to be. And I also believe that I am not God. I don't know everything. And so if what I think is true about the world that God made doesn't match with science, it doesn't mean that science is wrong.
It means that I am wrong in my assumptions. Jesus called us to heal the sick and feed the hungry and to not condemn or judge people. He spent his time with people that a lot of other people were judging and condemning. If I want to live my faith, it's my responsibility to love people and not to judge them.
That is not my job. I am not God. So when I say I don't want to include morality in the science, I mean that biology doesn't take sides. I'm not the one deciding what's right for someone else's life.
I'm the one explaining how the body works. Those are two very different jobs. My job is to make sure people understand the clinical truth of how their body works so they can make their own choices based on reality. Clinical science doesn't have social opinions.
It doesn't have judgments. It doesn't have hierarchies. It just has biological truths. And those biological truths, they don't care about your politics.
They do not care about your religion. They do not care about what side of any argument you're on. They're just true. And that is what makes them a safe place to start.
When I say clinical truth, I mean three things. Accurate information protects our kids. Knowledge is the real safety net. Biology taught without a moral lens removes the shame.
And science doesn't take sides, not politically, not religiously. It's just true. I used to be very involved in advocacy work. I was a speaker with Hunger Free Colorado, everything from PBS NewsHour to meeting with state legislators.
I testified on bills that impacted access to medical care and food. I started the first free clinic in my city because I wanted to make sure people had access to care. My own practice was a safety net clinic, about a quarter of Medicaid, and about 75% people who couldn't afford medical care. I kept costs down by having no staff and by running what's called a micro practice, which is very streamlined.
And then things changed. I was already a stroke survivor. Both my kids are autistic, my husband is autistic. And when the pandemic hit and everything shut down and they lost all their routines and all the things they loved, I made a decision.
I sold my practice on March 30th of 2020. I sold it to the current owner who is lovely and is doing a wonderful job, but it was time for me to move on. And I left with absolutely no plan for what I was going to be when I grew up. It was my sister who suggested I start teaching online.
And I discovered that I absolutely love teaching. I mean, I just absolutely love it. I also taught at the medical school, first and second year medical students, how to examine patients, how to talk with patients compassionately, how to take a history and actually listen. And that was my very favorite part of being a doctor after the teaching itself.
So getting to teach people how to do that well, that was a gift. But then a couple of years into the pandemic, I developed a COVID infection that became very serious and very scary. It ended up scarring my lungs and leaving me with long COVID. So I couldn't do the advocacy work anymore.
I couldn't do the volunteer work. I gave up my job at the medical school. I've been essentially housebound. I go to see my kids perform.
My son is a pre-professional dancer and my younger child is in the youth orchestra, but it completely wipes me out for days. It leaves me panting for breath and brings out my stroke symptoms. So I ended up choking on food and struggling with basic things. It's totally worth it, but it's also really, really hard.
And when your world becomes that small, you start thinking about what you can still do to make the world a better place when you can't do much else. I can't go to the state capital anymore. I can't run a free clinic, but I can teach. I love teaching people about their anatomy.
I love teaching students who aspire to healthcare careers how to think critically and actually understand what they're learning instead of just memorizing it. I'm teaching about neurodiversity in a very specific way, one that builds on the current neuropositive movement, but adds that extra science and clinical knowledge from my years of practice and my own family's experience. It helps people see their brains as different and not broken. But while I still know that all of that is important, it is.
I also saw bigger problems happening that I wanted to do something about. The more I thought about my years of caring for people of all ages, the more I heard stories from people about their lives, the more I realized that the way we teach sex education is the root of so many of these problems. The anatomy and pre-med career readiness, those are really important pieces of what I do. But this is something where I can make an even bigger difference for more people.
The amount of shame, the misinformation, the people not getting the healthcare they need because they don't understand the truth of what's happening in their own bodies, it's just a never ending argument between people saying, well, I think this is the right thing and I think that is the right thing. And it's pointless because there's no reality behind what anyone is saying. When we're focused on what is right and wrong in our eyes, we lose sight of the clinical truth. I decided the best thing I could do with the energy I have left is to take that clinical truth and get the word out to more people.
Because I want people to understand the truth of how absolutely awesome in the most awe-filled, awe kind of way. Humans truly are. It's a miracle that each one of us exists. And I need people to know that we are all made exactly how we're supposed to be.
There are no mistakes, which brings me back to my patient. Her mom finally decided to bring her to my office. They're both patients of mine. She called the urgent line and briefly explained the situation and I said I'd meet them both there.
So we all went straight over to my office. The OBGYN called me on the way and filled me on exactly what she'd seen on the ultrasound. So I could speak to it all with real knowledge of what we were dealing with. My patient and her husband had both grown up in households where they'd been taught that any sort of pregnancy termination was causing pain and suffering for the baby and was a horrible thing to do.
And my patient had actually been taken as a teenager to this very scary, very manipulative haunted house. One of those things designed to scare teenagers out of ever considering pregnancy termination for any reason. And I want to just stop there for a second because scaring a bunch of teenagers that way is horrible. Regardless of your position on anything, acting like every single person who has ever needed to terminate a pregnancy is an absolutely horrible person, that's not the clinical truth.
Pretending there's a suffering baby when clinically at that stage you're dealing with an early embryo with no brain and no capacity to experience any pain, that's not clinical truth either. Those are not things that help people. They're things that terrify people and terrified people make very dangerous decisions. So now her husband was absolutely adamant.
This was wrong. They would not do this. And the OBGYN's office couldn't reach them. Her mom was in a complete panic because her mom understood the danger that her daughter was in.
But the son-in-law, he was holding the line and the daughter was stuck in the middle. And I had to help them understand what was actually happening inside her body. The first thing I had to explain was basic female anatomy, which none of them knew. Not her, not her husband, not even her mom.
I had to explain what a fallopian tube is, where it is, what it does, how conception happens, how a fertilized egg ends up in the tube in the first place. By accident, not by choice, not by failure. The cells ended up in the wrong place. And then I had to explain the heartbeat.
Because yes, there was a flicker of a heartbeat. And they had been taught that a heartbeat means there's a baby, a person, a suffering creature that would feel what was happening. But that is not the clinical truth. The heart is actually the first organ to form.
And the reason for that is not because the baby is fully formed. It's because you have to have something to pump the blood around before you can develop everything else. The heart comes first, the brain comes much, much later. And at that stage, there's no brain.
There's no awareness. There's no capacity to pain or fear or anything else. I actually showed them a YouTube video of heart cells beating by themselves in a Petri dish because that is a real thing. Heart cells do that.
And I needed them to see that a heartbeat is not the same thing as a person experiencing something. It took over an hour, more than an hour of teaching and explaining basic anatomy, embryology, what actually happens, how it actually works, what this specific situation actually meant for her body and her safety. And by the end, they were all on board. They were all in agreement.
And while it was very, very sad for her and very hard, she got the treatment she needed and she survived. And she was able to go on to have other pregnancies. And frankly, they were all pretty angry, not at me, at the fact they'd been taught inaccurate information, that that information could have killed her and had been presented to them as moral truth. And because no one had ever given them the clinical truth, they had no way to know the difference.
She said she was so glad she finally understood how her body worked. Her husband was genuinely surprised by everything he learned. They ended up coming back for another appointment. He wanted to understand all of it, periods, conception, pregnancy, how it all actually works.
They were amazed at how complicated it is. And it was a really important part of their healing process was understanding that complexity, understanding that more than half of all pregnancies ended miscarriage, not because somebody did something wrong, not because there was a failure. That's just part of the process, a really miserable part of the process. And I wish it weren't, but it's the reality.
Understanding it doesn't make it less sad, but it makes it survivable in a completely different way. This story, that was about one patient, but it's also a pattern I saw over and over and over again in my clinical practice. The root of who each person is and how each person is is not a mistake. And what happens is clinical.
It's not a mistake. It's not messing up. It's not doing the wrong thing. It's what happens.
It's science. The way a person's body develops isn't a moral failure. Variation isn't shameful. And people deserve the clinical truth about their own bodies, especially when the stakes are high.
When someone has a miscarriage, they've not failed in their role as a human being. That's something that happens to more than half of all pregnancies. That's a miserable part of the process, but they've not failed. It's not that something is broken in them.
And relationships. Breaking up with someone, that is not a sign that you failed either or that you made a mistake or that you're stupid. It's a sign that you learned something and you're ready to grow. Now, humans certainly do make mistakes.
I'm not saying we're perfect. Being hateful is the wrong thing to do. Being judgmental is the wrong thing to do. Expecting people to do things that they literally cannot do, like hold their period or not have a miscarriage, is the wrong thing to do.
But doing things that are perfectly true clinically, things that are scientifically accurate, things that are necessary and important to save your life, those aren't mistakes. Those are not something to be ashamed of. Those are not things that a caring God would want you to be afraid of knowing. So much of what people learn about their own bodies is based on scare tactics.
Even when people are trying to be thoroughly scientific about it, even when the intention is good, there is so often this angle of trying to gross kids out, show them the worst case scenario pictures of diseases, trying to make them afraid of sex by making sex seem horrifying. And they understand where that motivation comes from. People are trying to communicate the severity of what could go wrong. But there's a huge difference between teaching, clinically, the reality of what happens, how things are treated, how things are, what you can do to prevent them, or what isn't preventable.
What can cause real long-term damage and just trying to scare people? I know so many people, especially girls, who are so traumatized by how they were taught about sex, they're actually afraid of their own sexuality. When that is a beautiful part of what humans are, for the majority of people, this is a normal, meaningful part of being human. And for those who are asexual, that is a completely normal thing too.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with them. But when we take this and we make it shameful and secretive, we twist it, we warp it into this unhealthy, hidden thing, and we encourage people to make bad choices and hide what they're doing and end up in bad situations because we were not open about it, because we didn't talk about what it was and what it really is, well, clinical truth is the antidote to all that. Not because clinical truth takes away the hard parts. The clinic has hard parts.
Life has hard parts. My patient's situation was hard. Miscarriage is hard. Infertility is hard.
I'm not pretending any of that away. But when we move from the bickering of, "I think this is right and I think this is right," and we move into the reality of how humans are actually built, something shifts. We stop seeing mistakes and we start seeing the awe-filled reality of the human story. It is a miracle that each one of us exists.
Every single one of us started as one single cell, went through this incredibly complex process and ended up here. That is not something to be afraid of. That is something to understand. If you want to learn and teach this in a way that is clinically accurate and shame-free, go to docrobinschool.com slash truth.
I'll see you next time. Take good care.