I was conceived accidentally by a couple of teenagers in the back seat of a 1960s pink Ford Zephyr at the drive-in movies in Adelaide. I don’t know what was playing that night, but it obviously didn’t capture my parents’ attention. Four months later, my Catholic grandparents marched their disgraced children down the aisle.
Except for my grinning father wearing a tight, borrowed suit, my 18-year-old mother and the rest of the family looked grim- faced in the wedding photos. My parents went on to have my little sister three years later. Their marriage lasted 15 years, which is not a bad track record for a shotgun wedding.
And so it was that my mother warned me not to make the same mistakes she’d made. ‘Don’t get married young, see the world, go to university, have a career, have lots of boyfriends be- fore you settle down and, most importantly, don’t get pregnant accidentally!’
Dutifully, I followed my mother’s instructions. I went to uni- versity and studied journalism, landed a job as a TV reporter, worked in London and Europe for six years, lived with my vio- linist boyfriend in Switzerland, and traveled the world.
When I met my husband-to-be, Stuart, in Sydney, I was 31 and ready to settle down. Within a few months, I fell pregnant accidentally. I was excited, but Stuart wasn’t so thrilled. Our relationship was still new and he was worried about how he’d support us. My mother’s words were ringing in my head, ‘Don’t ever make a man marry you because you’re pregnant.’ So, with a heavy heart, I had a termination. This was a decision that we both came to deeply regret.
Six months later, Stuart and I were married. I threw my contraceptive pill away and we tried in earnest to start a family. Nothing happened after the first year, but I wasn’t too worried. I was working as a TV reporter and traveling often. It was probably just bad timing, I told myself. After the second year, I began to worry I’d damaged my fallopian tubes, somehow, with the ter- mination. But tests revealed that everything was fine.
By the third year, the strain was taking its toll on our mar- riage, and I blamed Stuart for ‘making me have an abortion’. We began to argue more than we were having sex. By the fourth year, family and friends stopped asking about the ‘pitter-patter of little feet’. When I heard about friends falling pregnant easily I’d smile and congratulate them, and go home and cry.
I started to investigate IVF, but the only books I found were technical manuals and a devastating memoir by a woman who tried unsuccessfully for years and suffered terrible side-effects from the drugs.
At first, I stubbornly rejected IVF, saying, ‘We’ve conceived once naturally; we can do it again!’ Instead we spent a fortune on acupuncture, naturopaths, Chinese herbalists, spiritual healers, and ayurvedic medicine. By now my sense of humour was drying up and, according to my doctor, so were my eggs.
Around the time of my 37th birthday I met a woman at a party who told me she’d just had twins using IVF. When I told her my age, and that we’d been trying to conceive for five years, she said, ‘For God’s sake, woman, get yourself down to the Baby Factory and get on the IVF program. You’ve got no time to lose!’
So that’s exactly what we did. After talking to the nurses at the IVF clinic, I threw down my Visa card and said, ‘Book us in.’ At last I felt like we were doing something proactive. Every morning Stuart would inject me in the bottom and, except for one jab, which made me feel like my legs were crawling with ants, I didn’t have any adverse reactions to the drugs.
I didn’t tell anyone at work what we were doing, but every morning I felt buoyed by my secret when I logged on to my computer with the password ‘Zoë.’
Harvest or egg pick-up day was the first anniversary of September 11. As I placed my legs in stirrups and winced while the doctor extracted eggs with a long needle from my pumped-up ovaries, I wondered what sort of world I would be bringing a child into. But the human instinct to procreate seems to override logic, good sense, and even fear.
My pride at producing the grand total of nineteen eggs — as if I was a prize-winning chook — was dashed the next day when only three fertilised. I couldn’t help wondering whether my crusty old eggs were to blame or my husband’s lazy sperm.
At many IVF clinics they grow the fertilised egg for five days until it’s a multi-celled blastocyst, before transferring it into the moth- er’s womb. It seemed surreal that, while we were at work or out to dinner, our ‘offspring’ were growing in a petri dish in the city.
Every day Stuart would ring the lab to see how ‘the little guys’ were doing. In the meantime, I tried to convince Stuart we should have two embryos, rather than one, transferred to increase my chances, even though our doctor had warned us we could end up with twins. I left a letter on Stuart’s desk headlined: ‘Ten Reasons Why We Should Have Twins’ followed by bullet points. Stuart still laughs about it today, and wishes he’d kept that paper to re- mind me whenever I complain what a handful one child is.
As it turned out, we didn’t have the twin option. According to the lab, one blastocyst was way out in front as an ‘A’ grade speci- men, which meant the cells were dividing rapidly while the other two were growing more slowly. They recommend transferring the good one and freezing the other two as back-up. As it turned out, the slower blastocysts stopped dividing and simply disinte- grated before they even got to the freezer. I was devastated. The doctor tried to reassure me. ‘It’s not every day I get to transfer such a good-looking blastocyst,’ he said.
I’ll never forget looking down the microscope at what we nicknamed the ‘blasting blastocyst’ that was to became Zoë. After the doctor had transferred the fertilised egg into my uterus, I asked him if I should go home and put my legs up, so it wouldn’t fall out. He laughed. ‘There are women out there who have no idea they have a five-day-old embryo growing inside them, and they’re drinking champagne and dancing all night. Now it’s simply up to that embryo whether if wants to become a baby or not.’
Somehow, I found that strangely reassuring. For all its incredible technology, IVF still has to leave room for the magic and mystery of creation.
Zoë is Greek for ‘life’. Today, as I look at my beautiful, bright, and bubbly three-year-old daughter, I don’t just marvel at the wonder of IVF; I marvel at the wonder of her and all children.
Why does new life sometimes spring unbidden from a once- off romp in the back of a car and at other times refuse to blossom despite years of yearning? My newfound awe sent me on a quest to interview other people who’d also experienced IVF. I sought both men’s and women’s personal stories. As it turned out, it was mostly women who responded. I was touched by their open- hearted and candid stories. Together we sat in their kitchens or on their sofas, and laughed and wept at their journeys.
Not all the stories in this book have happy endings like mine. Some have given up IVF after years of trying without success; others are still on the treadmill.
After countless miscarriages, one woman finally gave birth to a baby, which tragically died weeks later from a rare congenital disease. Another couple gave birth to twins after a friend donated her eggs, while a mother of three impulsively donated her eggs to a stranger.
Women also tell of enduring personal tragedies in their quest for a child; while one woman mourned her brother’s suicide, another was dumped by her partner in the middle of her IVF cycle. Neither gave up their dreams of becoming mothers.
I also spoke to a remarkable young woman who was the prod- uct of one of the earliest IVF programs. At school she was teased and called a ‘test tube baby’; now she’s an ambassador for an in- fertility network.
Assisted reproductive technology has also made it possible for gays and singles to be parents, too. In this book, a gay male cou- ple and a single woman in her forties share their stories of baby hunger.
All these memoirs are very different. All display courage, de- termination, vulnerability, love, and proof that the desire for a baby is bigger than us all.
P.S. As I wrote this book, my pregnant belly pressed against the desk. After Zoë turned three, we decided not to do IVF again and to be content with one child. I gave away the high chair, the pram, and my maternity clothes. A month later my hands shook as I held the pregnancy test and looked at the two red lines showing a positive result. Our second daughter, Sienna, the homegrown type, was born just weeks after my publishing deadline.