Student pregnancy stories, told without polish.
Unplanned & Untold follows people who faced pregnancy while trying to stay afloat in school, family life, and early adulthood. The conversations are intimate and emotional, often returning to the moment everything changed and what support did or did not arrive afterward.
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Unplanned & Untold treats student pregnancy as a turning point with consequences that reach every part of life. The show is intimate. Its episodes are shaped by long, emotional interviews with women recounting pregnancy in college or early adulthood, often beginning with the moment they realized ordinary plans had collapsed. Family reaction is a major thread. Anna’s story, for example, moves from rebellion, an unhealthy relationship, and fear about her father’s public role to a kitchen conversation where love, heartbreak, and shock arrived together. The show does not flatten those moments into simple inspiration. It lets the harder details stay visible. Andrea’s account is especially heavy, following a college routine split between class and the NICU as her daughter Ella repeatedly improved, crashed, and finally died with family and medical staff gathered around her. That episode gives grief real time. It also shows the strange double life of being a student while living inside medical crisis. Emery Jones’s story brings the focus back to campus systems, describing a recent University of Alabama graduate and ER nurse who navigated nearly four years of college without the support she needed. The show often returns to the question of who shows up. Sometimes it is a parent, a sibling, a doctor, or a campus connection; sometimes the silence around a student mother is the point. Kaitlin Willing’s interviews are warm and direct, giving guests room to tell events in their own sequence. The pacing is not slick. It feels closer to a serious kitchen-table conversation, with pauses, repetitions, and emotional turns left intact. Faith and family values sit in the background of several stories without turning the show into a sermon. The strongest episodes balance pain with practical specificity: telling parents, attending labs, driving to the NICU, finishing school, and carrying grief after the public part of a crisis ends. Unplanned & Untold is most compelling when it shows how young motherhood can collide with college systems built for students without children. It is vulnerable, plainspoken, and sometimes devastating. Its purpose is not entertainment so much as witness: giving student mothers and grieving parents a place to say what happened, what failed them, and what helped them keep moving.
Made for: For listeners drawn to personal stories about college, pregnancy, young motherhood, faith, family pressure, grief, and resilience. It especially suits people interested in student-parent support and the emotional reality behind campus pregnancy experiences.
What sets it apart: The show stays close to lived detail: kitchen conversations, school schedules, NICU visits, graduation, and the aftermath of loss. Rather than broad commentary, it builds each episode around one person’s account of what support looked like when plans changed.
Unplanned & Untold dives into the real-life, unexpected twists of facing an unplanned pregnancy in college. Join us as we listen to the inspiring stories of those who overcame the odds to achieve their goals.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A plainspoken account of fear, family support, and starting over.
Anna's story turns on an unexpected pregnancy and the trip home to tell her parents the truth. The kitchen scene carries the most weight: a pastor father, a close family, and a mother whose first question is who the dad is.
A NICU story built from bedside routines, tearful admissions, and one devastating time of death.
The episode stays close to a double life that moves from class to the NICU and back, while Ella faces repeated setbacks just as she seems near going home.
Anna tells Caitlin Willing how a rebellious stretch in Fairhope, Alabama led to college struggles, hair school in Birmingham, and an unexpected pregnancy at 22.
Andrea describes a "double life" of Texas A&M classes, sorority life, and daily drives to the NICU while Ella spent about seven and a half months in the hospital.
A 19-year-old woman shares her emotional journey through an unplanned pregnancy, exploring options like abortion and adoption before giving birth to a premature baby who spent nearly a year in the NICU before passing away.
Unplanned & Untold host Caitlin Willing interviews Kelly, who became pregnant at 20 while playing basketball at a small Christian college in Southern California.
Lauren describes receiving hundreds of Facebook requests from strangers who wanted to watch the pregnant Auburn student, a reaction that made her feel like a circus show.
Lauren describes discovering she was pregnant at 19, shortly after finishing her freshman year at Auburn, after becoming violently sick during a summer daycare job.
Meghan, a political science major in Ellensburg, Washington, learned she was pregnant at a Planned Parenthood appointment during her junior year and remembers only crying in her car afterward.
Katie tells the Unplanned and Untold host Caitlin Willing that at 17 she was threatened by her restaurant boss, who showed her a gun and said he would take her family's lives if she told anyone.
This episode features an interview with Emery Jones, a recent University of Alabama graduate and ER nurse, who shares her story as a student mom navigating college without support and her involvement with Baby Steps in Tuscaloosa.