The Sunday Times Magazine • 21hris Dawson didn’t want any more children. “I thought,
I’m in my forties, that’s enough. I’m happy with the son
and daughter I already have.” His ten-year marriage to
Eva had been deteriorating for a while. Their two young
children had made them sleep-deprived and they were
talking less and less. “We probably had a conversation
a couple of times where she said, ‘I think maybe we
should have a third kid,’ and I said, ‘I think we have
enough on our plates right now. We’re just trying to
keep our relationship together,’ ” Chris tells me. “For
me, that was the end of it.”
So when Eva sat him down to tell him she was four
months pregnant, Chris’s first thought was that she
must be having an affair. But he knew that it was
impossible for her to get pregnant naturally: their son
and daughter had been conceived through IVF when
she was in her mid to late thirties, using donor eggs
and Chris’s sperm. Although Chris is British, they were
living in Eva’s native Sweden, where until recently egg
donation was severely restricted, so they had travelled
to Finland for treatment. They still had several embryos
remaining in storage and the Finnish clinic had written
to them requesting permission to move their embryos
to another facility. Chris wanted the embryos destroyed
or donated, but thought they still had time to decide
what to do with them. He’d pushed the clinic’s letter to
the back of his mind. Until now.
“She said, ‘I got pregnant at the clinic.’ I said, ‘How
did you do that? I never agreed to anything like this!’ ”
Chris says. “Then I slowly started to work back through
things.” Eva had told him she was away on a business
trip four months earlier, and he realised she must have
gone to Finland. “She forged my signature. She would
have planned this very carefully.”
Chris knew he was married to a doer, a problem-
solver: if Eva wanted something, she would find a way
of getting it. “But if you’d asked me a hundred things
that could happen, not one of those things would have
been her jumping on a plane without telling me and
getting herself impregnated with an embryo. She
never threatened to do it — she just did it. She had
absolutely no right to make that decision on her own.”
I ask how different this is from lying about being on
the pill deliberately to get pregnant. “It’s the difference
between manslaughter and premeditated murder,”
he replies acidly.
Seething with fury at his wife, Chris left their home,
went to a bar with two close friends and got drunk. They
told him he had to leave her. “But it wasn’t that easy.
I thought, if I would leave, then this child would always
know that their mum and dad divorced when they were
born. They are going to figure out that it was something
to do with them. They would think it was their fault,”
he says. “I’d been put in an impossible position and
I realised I had no option but to weather it.”
Eva went on to give birth to a baby boy, but the pain of
her deception did irreparable harm to their relationship.
By the time their son was two they had divorced. (Chris
and Eva’s names have been changed.)
Chris’s story may seem extraordinary, but he is not
the first man to become the father of a child against his
will in this way. There have been several documented
instances where women have had embryos thawed and
implanted in fertility clinics after forging their partner’s
signature on consent forms, with some cases reaching
courts in England, Germany and the US. Although rare,
they serve as cautionary tales about what can — and
does — happen now that reproductive technology has
become a routine part of making families.About 20,000 babies are born following IVF
treatment each year in the UK. In 2019, 41 per cent of
all IVF cycles were frozen rather than fresh embryo
transfers. In 1991 only 10 per cent were frozen and
90 per cent were fresh. Improvements in freezing
techniques and live birth rates — and a desire to limit
multiple births after fertility treatment — mean that
most IVF patients will now have a single fresh embryo
transferred during their first cycle of treatment, with
any remaining embryos frozen and stored for use in
subsequent cycles. It’s now common for many years to
elapse between conception and implantation; years
during which two people’s ideas about the size of the
family they want together — and the health and strength
of their relationship — have time to change drastically.
Chris’s experience exposes vulnerabilities in the way
that clinics check they still have the consent of both
adults in fertility treatment, as well as the conversations
couples need to have when they decide to use assisted
reproductive technology to become parents.
Chris had been enjoying the single life when he
met Eva. “She was very beautiful and so interesting.
I thought, I don’t want to meet you now. But
opportunities like this don’t come around every two
minutes, so we went for it.” Within a few months they
were engaged — “a whirlwind thing”. By the time
they were married he was ready to be a father and
Eva was determined to be a mother. “Her biological
clock was ticking and she’s very focused on goals —
work goals, life goals, whatever they are.”
But after a year and a half of trying, it was clear this
particular goal was eluding them. There was a problem
with Eva’s eggs: she didn’t have enough of good
quality to conceive a baby naturally. After three or
four failed rounds of IVF — requiring daily injections,
follicle-stimulating hormones, invasive scans and
egg collection under sedation, each time followed by
heartbreak — they decided to look into adoption.
“We went quite far into the process and had a home
visit by the social workers. We probably would have
gone through with adoption, but then she found out
about egg donation.”
They knew they would have to travel abroad for
treatment, but Finland was only a short flight away. They
found a clinic outside Helsinki, paid about €10,000
(£9,000) and found a donor whose looks matched Eva’s.
While they didn’t plan to hide the circumstances of
their baby’s conception, they never talked about when
or how they would tell their children that they were
conceived using IVF and donor eggs. They were tooA frozen embryo is thawed and
prepared for IVF treatment at
a fertility clinic laboratory32%
The clinical
pregnancy rate per
embryo transferGETTY IMAGES ➤