The Sunday Times Magazine • 23focused on the prospect that Eva might finally be able
to become pregnant to think about much else.
“We definitely didn’t have too many mature
conversations about consequences,” Chris says.
“All our mutual friends were having children around
that time, so there was a lot of peer pressure. She
desperately wanted to have children.” While they had
to “jump through hoops” during the adoption process
to demonstrate the strength of their relationship to
social workers, the clinic made no such inquiries.
From that batch of donor eggs a son was born. They
went back to the clinic three years later and Eva became
pregnant with their second child, a girl. But the years of
fertility treatment, of hopes raised, dashed and raised
again, had begun to take their toll on Eva and Chris’s
relationship and they weren’t getting on any more.
Chris began to resent being railroaded into choices he
never wanted to make. “We sold our apartment and
moved to a house. I somehow allowed myself to be
dragged into suburbia — another decision I just allowed
her to drive,” he says. He started to sleep downstairs in
a separate bedroom. “Things just festered. We weren’t
speaking as much as we should have. Although I never
imagined she would do what she did.”
Chris has tried to put himself in Eva’s position to
understand what must have been going through her
mind when she forged his signature. “There has to have
been some instinctive thing that was going on inside her
that said, ‘I can’t let these embryos go,’ ” he says. “I never
sat down with her and said, ‘Have you reflected on what
you did?’ We never had that type of conversation.” It
was simpler to try to live with the consequences of
her actions than interrogate the mindset behind them.
Throughout the pregnancy Chris feared he would
resent the child Eva was carrying, a baby he had never
wanted to be born. “I was 43 and looking forward
to getting past the small kids phase. Suddenly I was
facing another four or five years of it. I was going to
be 50 before I had children that were reasonably
independent. I was worried about it,” he says. “I found
myself able to get through the pregnancy without the
same level of enthusiasm as before. And then by the
end I was as happy as anybody would be with a third
child. I was able to love him. And I do love him as much
as my other two children. I thought, it’s better that
I don’t sit and reflect about things on a daily basis
because it’s just going to make things more difficult.
I put it in the cupboard, locked the door.”
In the ten years since Eva told him she’d got pregnant
with their third child without his consent, he has oftenthought about confronting the clinic where it took
place. “I wrote emails, which I’ve never sent,” he says.
“What stopped me was that it wouldn’t change
anything for me. Maybe I could have got a hundred
grand if I tried to sue them, but that would never have
ended up in a nice way for my children.”O
ther men who have found themselves in the
same position as Chris refused to lock away their
feelings of betrayal, pain and injustice. In 2017 a
man known publicly as ARB lost his High Court
claim for damages against the London fertility
clinic IVF Hammersmith after his ex-wife, R,
became pregnant with their embryo against his
wishes. ARB and R were married when they went for
fertility treatment together in 2008, which led to the
birth of their son. Five remaining embryos were then
frozen and stored in case they wanted to have another
baby in the years to come. But by 2010 their marriage
had broken down, and R returned to IVF Hammersmith
alone seeking further treatment: she had forged ARB’s
signature by tracing it on the consent form in ballpoint
pen. One of the embryos was thawed and she became
pregnant with ARB’s second baby without his
knowledge or consent. She told him she was pregnant
on Valentine’s Day in 2011 and gave birth to their
daughter four months later. ARB had been seeking more
than £1 million in damages to cover the costs of raising
the daughter he came to accept but didn’t want —
described by the judge as “by all accounts, a lovely,
healthy girl” — claiming “wrongful birth” compensation
for a child who should never have been born. ARB’s
case was dismissed at the Court of Appeal in 2018.
Wrongful birth claims usually arise when a baby is
born with congenital conditions or disabilities that
were caused either by negligence during delivery or
should have been detected during pregnancy and, had
they been discovered, would have led the parents to
seek a termination. The NHS paid out more than
£30 million in damages for wrongful births in the
2019-20 financial year.
“Ultimately, ARB failed because, as a matter of public
policy, we don’t allow compensation in the UK for
healthy children,” explains James Lawford Davies, a
partner at the law firm Hill Dickinson and a specialist in
the regulation of life sciences, with a particular interest
in reproductive technologies and embryo research.
Lawford Davies acted for IVF Hammersmith in ARB’s
case. “The judge went into quite a lot of detail about
how it would be an impossible exercise
to calculate the costs versus the
benefits of a healthy child, and the joy
that they bring as opposed to the cost
of their clothes and so on. There is a
series of cases that have looked at
whether or not people can be
compensated for healthy children
— a number of them related to failed
vasectomies where men thought that
they would not conceive — and the
courts have consistently held that in
those circumstances people shouldn’t
be compensated.”
When ARB alerted the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
(HFEA) to the circumstances
of his daughter’s birth, the HFEA said
his situation was “highly unusual if not
unique”. But across the world otherFertilised embryo samples are
routinely placed in cryogenic
storage after a first IVF cycle10
The number of years
frozen embryos are
usually stored for.
This period can be
extended with
consent from both
partners. There is no
known deterioration
in the health of the
embryo with time“SHE NEVER
THREATENED
TO DO IT — SHE
JUST DID IT. SHE HAD
NO RIGHT TO MAKE
THAT DECISION
GETTY IMAGES ➤ ON HER OWN”