…”the consent form that released one of your frozen embryos. Your signature is on it too. We now believe it was forged.”
I had to sit down. Three years earlier, before I got pregnant naturally, my husband, Nate, and I had gone through IVF. We’d frozen two embryos for the future.
My sister, Jenna, was crying so hard she could barely talk. She told me Nate had said he couldn’t have children “the normal way” with her because it would hurt me too much if I found out. He convinced her to go to a clinic with him and said they’d use his sperm and a donor egg. She never saw the paperwork. She never imagined the “donor” was me.
The specialist, Dr. Osei, explained that the clinic’s records showed one of our embryos had been transferred into Jenna eight weeks earlier. The release form had my signature, but the handwriting expert at the clinic had flagged it during a routine audit. “Biologically,” he said gently, “the baby your sister is carrying is your child and your husband’s.”
My sister was carrying my baby. My husband had given away a part of our family without asking me, to the woman he was cheating with.
I reported the forgery to the police and the medical board. Nate was charged with fraud and forgery. The clinic suspended the staff member who had accepted the forms without verifying my identity. My lawyer moved my last embryo to a different clinic, under my name only.
The question no one could answer easily was what came next. Jenna and I didn’t speak for weeks. Then she called me and said, “I don’t know how to be a mother to a baby who is biologically yours, and I don’t know how to give her away. Can we decide together?”
We went to counseling, the two of us, every week. Slowly, painfully, we found our way. When my son was born, Jenna came to the hospital. When her daughter was born six months later, I held her hand in the delivery room.
With the help of a family court judge, we agreed that Jenna would raise her, and I would be legally recognized as her biological mother, with regular time together and a place in her life forever. It isn’t a normal family. But it’s honest now.
Nate signed away his parental rights to both children as part of his plea deal. My son and my niece, who is also his full sister, are growing up three houses apart. They call each other “cousin-sister” and “cousin-brother,” and nobody has corrected them yet.
