In vitro fertilization (IVF), despite all of its functional, ethical, and moral pitfalls, is often pitched as a means to build a family. In 47-year-old Erin Millender’s case, IVF tore her family apart before it even began.
As the New York Times detailed last week, Millender is pregnant with her ex-husband’s child after she secretly implanted one of the couple’s IVF-created embryos before he filed an appeal requesting a court revisit a judgement that awarded his former wife custody of their frozen, unborn children. But the story doesn’t start there.
Deceived by the lies sold by fourth-wave feminism about prioritizing an Ivy League education and career over marriage and kids, Millender ignored her biological clock until 35 — her so-called “drop-dead date.” By then, the dating pool was diluted. Most of the men who wanted to settle down and raise a family were already doing so.
At 39, Millender finally found someone she thought fit her bill “as a man she could have a baby with, at least as a co-parent, if not as a husband.” Yet, it took several “clear ultimatums” to get the guy to take the next relationship step and propose. By then, Millender was diagnosed with infertility and immediately pushed by her fertility doctor to start IVF.
When Adam Rubin finally agreed to marry Millender, he did so on the condition that they would not start IVF until after the wedding. So Millender gave marriage a month before she went in for the painful, pricey, and sometimes traumatizing procedure to retrieve her eggs.
Together, Millender and Rubin rode the IVF roller coaster of harvesting eggs and fertilizing them only to implant an embryo that didn’t stick and start the process all over again.
The NYT reported that Millender became so obsessed with trying to get pregnant that she told her husband he was no longer a “priority” and “asked him to stop attending their I.V.F. appointments so she could better focus on the procreative task at hand.” Millender claimed that Rubin was not pushed away but became “increasingly uninterested in their pregnancy plans.”
After an unknown number of embryos were created and potentially discarded due to widely-used yet notoriously unreliable embryo grading, Millender received word that she and Rubin were the proud parents of two “viable embryos.”
But by then, Rubin was fed up with Millender’s baby-making tunnel vision. He hired a divorce lawyer and contacted the fertility facility in an effort to revoke his consent for Millender’s upcoming embryo transfer.
“I did not endure the I.V.F. process, assist with medical appointments and injections with the intention of being reduced to an anonymous donor,” Rubin allegedly wrote in his divorce affidavit.
Millender, unsure of what the future held for her already created embryos, pivoted. She underwent yet another round of egg retrieval with the hopes of purchasing random sperm and creating new embryos that Rubin played no biological role in creating, but it was too late. At 44, egg quality had significantly declined. Millender’s best and only bet would be to use the embryos she already had.
Most state laws are not equipped to handle embryo custody disputes, so when Millender challenged Rubin for custody of their frozen offspring, it was chaotic. A New York judge eventually ruled that Millender’s “interest in obtaining control over the remaining embryos supersedes” Rubin’s desire that they be discarded or handed over for dissection.
Millender, with the assurance of several lawyers, secretly hustled to implant one of the two embryos before Rubin could file an appeal. At 47 years old, she would be having Rubin’s baby whether he liked it or not.
Embryo custody battles between bickering spouses and even boyfriends and girlfriends are not a new IVF hurdle. They are the logical conclusion of a fertility industry that perpetually prioritizes profit over people, adults’ selfish desires over children’s natural rights, quick fixes over long-term women’s health solutions, desirable traits above all, forced orphanhood, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, and making human existence transactional.
[RELATED: This Horror Story Of An IVF-Addicted 68-Year-Old Is Everything Wrong With Big Fertility]
The biggest loser in this case might look like Rubin, but it’s actually his child. The embryo spared from certain death only by judge’s read on vague and sometimes nonexistent fertility law will still grow up to be a child with wounds only made possible by IVF and adults putting their reproductive desires ahead of kids’ rights and best interests.
Millender’s child is not only at higher risk for complications like heart defects, but he or she will be born virtually fatherless to a mother who will reach retirement age by the time he or she graduates high school. Children who are not raised by their married biological parents have clear physical, emotional, and educational disadvantages that do not systematically affect their peers in stable nuclear family situations. Fatherless boys specifically are less likely to graduate and more prone to criminal acts and violence.
The fertility industry promotes IVF as a safety net that gives people like Millender the option to delay or outsource childbearing, but it’s really a trap that is far from foolproof. IVF doesn’t guarantee parenthood, but it does promise a host of legal, moral, and physical problems for potential parents and certainly for the children it creates.
