Just as soon as I published my previous blog post about Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, I saw an update on the trial: Amber Heard and Elon Musk when they were together for a year back in 2016. Heard’s sister, Whitney, testified that Amber still wanted to conceive a child using their embryos AFTER the couple broke up in 2017, and threw a tantrum when Musk refused.
Amber Heard was always open about how she could never have children naturally, as well as how eager she was to have children. She had a daughter via surrogate last year, and it’s assumed she’s raising her on her own. But it’s unknown who the biological father of the child is. I’ve opened up about my specific infertility journey on this blog in previous posts. My husband and I still have a couple of frozen embryos from our IVF procedure. This newly released information about Amber Heard’s infertility journey got me thinking of my own struggles with infertility, the aftermath of it, and the what-ifs.
The procedure of making the embryos is the easy part in the whole IVF process. Or at least for me it was. Each woman’s and each couple’s experience is different. Therefore, I can only speak for myself and speak of my own personal experience. As my husband and I were moving on to the embryo transfer process, we met with the nurse at our fertility clinic. She gave us more information on what our future baby could inherit from us fertility wise. She gave us so much paperwork that it could be a book in itself.
Then she gave us paperwork to sign for agreement purposes on what to my husband and I wanted to do with the embryos in case of a divorce or a death. After thoroughly discussing our options, we both mutually agreed that in a case of a death, we’ll keep the embryos, but in a case of a divorce, we get rid of the embryos altogether. And so, we signed to what we both agreed to, as well as that we respected each other’s decisions.
Here’s the thing about embryos: They’re not human beings. They’re not living beings. Some women who struggle with infertility even call them embabies. They’re not. They’re a mix of a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm that could make a baby in the future. My husband isn’t just my sperm donor, and I’d never treat him as one. He’s my life partner, and I want him to be the father of my children. But if we were to get break up while still childless, there’s no chance I’d ever use our embryos. It’s one thing for a woman to choose to have a baby alone and use a sperm donor. It’s a whole other story to decide to have IVF as a couple, and then try to use your partner as a sperm or egg donor by using the embryos anyways when you break up, especially when you signed papers agreeing not to.
This reminded me of Sofia Vergara and her former fiancé. They made embryos together when they were still together, and her former fiancé attempted to sue her when they broke up because he still wanted to use their embryos to have children. In his words, the embryos were still people who deserved a chance at life. Vergara, not surprisingly, won the case and had the embryos destroyed.
The fact of the matter is, even when a woman is pregnant, the child she’s carrying still isn’t a human being. It’s an embryo that turns into a fetus that turns into a human being AFTER birth. I’m speaking as someone who’s going through infertility herself and has embryos frozen. I’m a big believer in human life, choice, and respect. We all have to identify the real definition of what a human life is, we need to realize that we all have a choice, including our partners that we make embryos with, and we all have to respect our decisions when it comes to what we want or need to do with anything that is our responsibility.
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