A woman has shared a heartbreaking story of fertility struggles, in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and eventually… abortion.
In an article written for the Daily Mail, the anonymous woman said she and her husband are both 47, and began trying to have a baby when she was 36. After a year of trying unsuccessfully, doctors diagnosed them with “unexplained infertility,” and after another three years, they still had not been able to get pregnant.
“The obvious answer was to try IVF. We weren’t eligible on the NHS where we live, and the prospect of success for a woman my age was pretty bleak, too,” she wrote. “But Alex was so keen for us to keep trying that he even suggested we draw up names. ‘The body conceives what the mind believes’, was his theory.”
The writer explained that the quality of her eggs had “nosedived” by the time she reached 40, and so she began researching using donor eggs from Ukraine, and fertilizing them with her husband’s sperm.
“Unlike the UK, there were no waiting lists for eggs and the laws ensured the donor remained anonymous. Plus it was far cheaper than other countries — just £4,000, including flights, accommodation and medical treatment. I emailed Alex the clinic details and held my breath for his response,” she explained. “Over a series of evenings, we then talked it through — over FaceTime because he was working away. To my mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him: we’d touched on it in the past as a plan B and now I wanted us to make it a reality. I had been mulling it over for months and I assumed he had, too. Still, without speaking in the flesh, we settled on starting this new plan when he returned to London in a month’s time.”
She began making arrangements, and in the next several months, her husband left a sperm sample, which was then used to fertilize the donor egg. After the embryo had been created, it was transferred into the writer’s uterus — and surprisingly, she was pregnant.
Yet her husband wasn’t as excited.
“I was over the moon, but when I told Alex he seemed oddly withdrawn. I put it down to him working long hours and carried on getting excited, planning who to tell first,” she said. “At our eight-week private scan, the sonographer picked up the little heartbeat and I burst into tears of joy, while Alex looked on. The expression on his face was not one of unbridled joy. He seemed shell-shocked. Outside the clinic, I light-heartedly touched on how laid-back he was. He looked at me and said quietly: ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ll bond with a baby that isn’t actually ours.’ I was speechless.” The baby was created using his sperm.
Within a week, the writer’s husband was pressuring her to have an abortion, and threatened to leave the marriage if she kept the baby.
READ: Pressured to abort five times, she refused. Now her son is thriving.
“Had we had the fertility treatment at home, we’d have been encouraged to have counselling first, which would have mitigated this,” she wrote. “Deep down I blamed myself for rushing headlong into becoming a mother at any cost. But why on earth did he not say anything beforehand? He was there the very moment I had the embryo transferred.”
Tragically, she decided to have the abortion to satisfy her husband. She wrote:
The prospect of bringing up a child on my own seemed bleak. How would I do it? I’ve seen so many friends struggle as lone parents, hand on heart I couldn’t knowingly do that to myself or my future child.
And then there was the most dreaded thought: what if Alex left me for someone else and had children with her? It was as though a gun were being held to my head.
A week later I told him I’d decided to have a termination and the look of relief on his face as he opened his arms to give me a hug said it all. Inside I felt a mixture of profound anger and sadness. And yet I knew it was the right decision — for him.
I can’t remember the day I had the procedure — it was so painful my brain seems to have wiped it from my memory — but I told Alex not to accompany me. I needed to do it alone. The guilt I experienced that day was enough without him being there, too.
It’s sadly not uncommon for women to be coerced, manipulated, and pressured by family members or partners into having an abortion. One study found that 64% of post-abortive women reported that they had been coerced into the procedure.
After the abortion, there were still two embryos left frozen; she filed paperwork to have them destroyed.
WATCH: Can’t Stay Silent: The Reality of Abortion Regret, Trauma, and Healing
The couple is still together, though the writer said the love she feels for her husband is now mixed with resentment “to the point of fury.” Though she hoped she might still get pregnant naturally, that never happened, and she said she lost the chance to become a mother.
“Many times I have been a heartbeat away from walking out on him. On the anniversary of my due date, which I remember every year, I feel it all over again and hate what he has done to me,” she said. “But, as strange as it sounds, I don’t want to leave him and the life we have created. In part it’s a lack of bravery, but also because in some ways I understand why he did what he did. Becoming a father wasn’t the be-all and end-all for Alex, whereas becoming a mother felt that way to me.”
She said her husband refuses to even discuss the whole situation.
“I know he sees my sadness, but he won’t ever acknowledge it — he has just erased that part of our life,” she said. “But papering over those feelings hasn’t worked for me. I never found out the sex of the embryo I so briefly carried, but I felt she was a girl — and seeing children of about the age she’d be, like that seven-year-old on the Easter egg hunt, still feels like a knife to the heart.”
Editor’s Note: The feelings of anger this writer has experienced, along with her husband’s total avoidance of discussing the abortion, are not uncommon responses to a traumatic abortion experience. Both men and women can suffer after abortion. If you or someone you know is struggling with a past abortion, visit the International Helpline for Abortion Recovery or Rachel’s Vineyard for information and assistance.
