Australian Story: Sept 14

Next week Australian Story meets a Sydney mother who is creating an extended family for her daughter, after using a fertility clinic in the US.

Sydney woman Natalie Lovett was 46 and childless when she flew to the United States to create a baby.

She’d exhausted all her other options to become pregnant and was following up on a San Diego fertility clinic that offered a money back guarantee. And she wasn’t disappointed.

After trying for seven years to conceive in Australia, she purchased anonymous donor eggs and donor sperm. Today she’s the proud mother of 18-month old Lexie.

“It’s kind of a crazy thing, you date and you think about what you want in a partner and all of that. Well finding a donor is very similar.” – Natlie Lovett

“Natalie had to battle the entire world to get Lexie.” – Amanda Lovett-Jones, sister

“I am not alone there are lots of Australians going overseas to create a child.” – Natalie Lovett

“I think baby lust is very strong and very powerful, and so people desperately want to become parents. Some people will go to great lengths to travel anywhere to meet that need.” – Kate Bourne, Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority.

Lovett was taken by surprise when the US clinic where she’d had the embryo transfer asked her what she wanted to do with her remaining embryos. Now she faced a very different dilemma.

“Destroying the embryos just wasn’t really an option. It was just something I could never bring myself to do. I’d rather give them a great home and a great life.” she says.

Natalie came up with an unconventional solution – to create a modern extended family for her only child.

“I have one perfect daughter and then I’m told I have another 25 embryos that I can either destroy, donate to science or give away,” she says. “I could never destroy them so I decided to give them to other childless families.”

Lovett said she didn’t deliberately choose anonymous donors they just happened to be the ones that she thought would give her the best chance at success. The egg donor was in her mid-twenties and considered very fertile.

Kate Bourne, of the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, says Australian clinics no longer use anonymous donors because it is not considered best practice as many donor conceived children want the choice to meet their donors.

So far Lovett has three embryo recipients, and two are now pregnant. Australian Story follows one of the recipients, a South Australian woman, through her journey to try to get pregnant using two of Lovett’s American embryos.

Producer: Janine Cohen
Executive Producer: Deb Masters

8pm Monday on ABC.