BY CATHERINE PEARSON
ILLUSTRATION BY NOMA BARR
ichelle was still nursing her daughter, born through
in vitro fertilization, when she found out she was
pregnant again. It was entirely unexpected — she
wasn’t using any fertility drugs.¶ Several years
earlier, the Indiana mother found herself so determined to have her first child, she resorted to
using donor eggs. She and her husband made the
decision following a string of devastating failures: Michelle suffered two miscarriages and gave birth to a stillborn baby at 20
weeks. She tried three failed rounds of intrauterine insemination
(IUI) — a procedure in which her husband’s sperm were placed
directly in her uterus using a catheter. Then she moved on to IVF,
which involves joining an egg and sperm together in a laboratory
dish and placing the fertilized egg into a woman’s uterus.
Michelle tried one round using her own eggs. That failed, too.
In early 2003, at the age of 42,
Michelle, who asked that only her
first name be used for this article,
made the difficult decision to
place another woman’s fertilized
egg in her body. She gave birth
to a daughter, whom she lovingly
describes as bright, daring and, at
8 years old, “all girl — pink and
purple and sparkly.” Initially, she
worried about using donor eggs
and giving up a genetic link to
her daughter. But now she cannot
believe she ever, even fleetingly,
doubted her ability to love a child
who wasn’t genetically hers. That
feeling was confirmed when she
gave birth to her second child, her
biological son, now 7. Both feel
entirely hers, she said, and both
feel miraculous.
“Sometimes my husband and
I hear them playing in the other
room and we look at each other
and say, ‘Can you believe how
lucky we are?’” Michelle said.