For Charli Worgan and her husband Cullen, one of the most ordinary questions asked of married couples carried an unusually complicated answer.
“When are you going to have children?”
People asked it often.
But when they learned that both Charli and Cullen have forms of dwarfism, the question sometimes changed.
Why would they have children at all?
The Australian couple knew that becoming parents would involve genetic risks and difficult decisions.
They also knew they wanted a family.
Today, Charli and Cullen are parents to three children — and their journey has become a widely followed story about parenthood, genetics and the assumptions strangers make about families who look different.
Charli has achondroplasia, the most common form of disproportionate short stature.
Cullen has a different and much rarer skeletal condition, geleophysic dysplasia.
That difference made each pregnancy medically complicated.
Because both conditions can involve genetic variants that may be passed to children, doctors explained that their babies could inherit Charli’s condition, Cullen’s condition, neither condition, or potentially genetic changes from both parents.
Medical literature confirms that when one parent has achondroplasia and the other has a different dominantly inherited skeletal dysplasia, children may inherit either condition, neither condition or genetic variants from both parents. The last possibility can be associated with particularly serious outcomes depending on the exact conditions involved.
For Charli, those possibilities meant pregnancy was never simply a matter of waiting for a due date.
It involved testing.
Waiting.
And trying to prepare herself for answers she might not want to hear.
When she became pregnant with her third child, she explained publicly that the point when many parents begin announcing a pregnancy — around 12 weeks — was instead when she was undergoing chorionic villus sampling, or CVS.
The test takes a small sample of placental tissue so doctors can examine genetic material.
For Charli and Cullen, it could reveal which genetic variants their baby had inherited.
That meant waiting to learn not simply whether the pregnancy appeared healthy, but what their child’s genetic future might look like.
Charli described four possibilities doctors had discussed with them.
Their baby could be of average stature.
The baby could inherit achondroplasia from Charli.
The baby could inherit Cullen’s skeletal dysplasia.
Or the child could inherit genetic variants connected to both parents’ conditions, an outcome their medical team had warned could carry severe or potentially life-limiting consequences.
For weeks, Charli said, that uncertainty overshadowed everything else.
Instead of simply celebrating the pregnancy, she was waiting to discover whether she would be able to carry it forward safely.
She also knew people were judging her.
Charli had already encountered criticism after she and Cullen became parents.
Some strangers questioned whether they should have chosen to have biological children knowing that dwarfism could be inherited.
Rather than hiding from those comments, Charli began talking openly about the medical reality behind their decisions.
She wanted people to understand that none of it was casual.
“I’ve copped criticism for choosing to have babies with these odds,” she wrote while discussing her third pregnancy.
Her point was straightforward:
People watching from the outside saw a photograph of a pregnant woman.
They did not see the genetic counseling, invasive testing, anxious waiting and conversations with doctors that came with it.
Charli began sharing more of the family’s life online after the birth of their first daughter.
What started as an attempt to educate people gradually developed into a large social-media community.
Her posts showed ordinary family moments alongside conversations about dwarfism, pregnancy, medical appointments and public reactions.
Their first daughter, Tilba, inherited achondroplasia like her mother.
Their second daughter, Tully, inherited Cullen’s form of dwarfism.
Then came their third pregnancy.
The family waited again.
Eventually, their son Rip arrived in early 2021.
Suddenly, the household that strangers had once questioned had become a family of five.
Charli’s posts after his birth focused less on genetic probabilities and more on something parents everywhere would recognize:
exhaustion.
Gratitude.
And the realization that there is no perfect formula for raising children.
“There’s no ‘correct’ way to do motherhood,” she wrote after Rip’s birth, adding that she did not believe there was one single “wrong” way either.
The message captured much of what she had been trying to communicate for years.
Dwarfism was part of their family.
It shaped some medical decisions.
It meant certain pregnancies required additional testing.
And it meant their children could face health challenges that other children might not.
But it did not define every moment of their lives.
Achondroplasia itself is a genetic skeletal condition most commonly associated with variants in the FGFR3 gene.
If one parent has achondroplasia and the other parent is of average stature, each pregnancy generally has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the condition.
When both parents have genetic skeletal dysplasias, however, counseling becomes more complex because a child may inherit variants from either or both parents.
Geleophysic dysplasia is considerably rarer and can involve several different genes.
Its features can include short stature, joint limitations and, in some affected people, cardiac or respiratory complications.
The exact inheritance pattern depends on the gene involved, which is one reason individualized genetic counseling matters so much.
For families like the Worgans, genetics therefore cannot be reduced to a simple headline.
Each pregnancy can require individualized testing and specialist advice.
And reproductive decisions remain deeply personal.
That is also why Charli pushed back against strangers who believed they understood the couple’s choices simply by looking at them.
She did not pretend pregnancy had been easy.
Quite the opposite.
She shared some of its most frightening moments precisely because she wanted people to understand how carefully those decisions had been considered.
Over time, the family’s social-media presence became less about defending their right to become parents and more about simply showing what their life actually looked like.
Three children.
Two parents.
Medical appointments.
School days.
Family photographs.
Arguments, exhaustion, celebrations and ordinary chaos.
The details that make one family different from another matter.
But they are not the whole story.
Years earlier, strangers had looked at Charli and Cullen and asked why they would risk having children.
The couple ultimately answered in the most straightforward way possible.
They built their family.
And then they let people see the reality behind it.
