Abbey LeVine is an Emmy award winning documentary producer and founder of Momma by Design. She and I met when we were both quoted in a Good Morning America story titled How Two Single Women Determined to Become Mothers Created Three Families, which was all about the journey of becoming pregnant with donated embryos.
Abbey gave birth to her daughter Gala in September 2019, when she was 46 years old. She now educates and mentors people about the beauty of embryo donation.
Dr. Aimee: I am beyond delighted to have Abbey on today to talk to us about her journey to motherhood. Welcome, Abbey.
Abbey LeVine: Thank you for having me, Aimee. I want to say that I love your work. I am so glad that we met. Thank you for your time.
Dr. Aimee: Would you share about your journey to become a mother?
Abbey LeVine: The first thing that I want to say is that I don’t think anyone’s first choice is embryo donation. I don’t think anybody wakes up and says, “I’m going to have a donated embryo.” There’s a long process to get to this step. I really want to normalize the idea.
I fully feel that I have 100% the right child in my life and I am so grateful. If I can do anything at all to help people skip through some of the heartache of whatever the journey is, I want to encourage them to reach out to me. I am now a big advocate for healthy eggs via donation.
I didn’t know that I wanted to have children until I was over 35. I never even considered freezing any eggs. I dated two people who I thought were going to be baby-daddies, they were very secure in their life and I was in love with them, and we were settling down. Neither of them worked out to be the right guy for me. Then suddenly around 42, I realized that I didn’t have a lot of options. I had this call to become a mother, but I’m sort of oddly spiritual in the way that I feel like everything works out the way that it’s supposed to work out, and I just knew I was going to be a mother somehow.
I looked into fostering children, and I decided it wasn’t the right route for me for my first child, so I researched adoption and it didn’t line up for me.
For eight years, every time I had sex, I cried when I got my period. Really. I always thought it might happen naturally with my partner at the time. But it never happened.
It really was happenstance for me. I don’t know, I hope this is still encouraging for other people. I have a friend who had donated embryos, so she paid for eggs and sperm, and she made 17 embryos. She was a genius egg finder and chose somebody who produced, I think, 22 eggs in one take. My friend tried to get pregnant using 10 embryos unsuccessfully. It turned out that she didn’t know that her uterus couldn’t hold the embryos. It wasn’t the eggs, but we also didn’t know this either. So, that part of the journey was interesting.
Wendy, as I found out later, was trying to give her embryos to a lot of different women. She understood the gift of what they were. Before my friend knew she was going to adopt and she still had the embryos, and she knew that her uterus wasn’t able to carry to term, she said, “I just wish I could find a surrogate.”
At the time, I was teaching spinning and I just felt really healthy, and I actually jokingly said, “I’ll carry twins,” having no idea that I couldn’t just easily become pregnant with twins. I thought they’d just put in two embryos and I would carry them. I said, “I’ll carry them and they can be siblings, so you can have one and I can have one baby.” That was just my creative brain saying there is a way.
Of course, at that time it didn’t work out. My uterus actually wasn’t ready. I had fibroids removed. I had to have breast surgery to have a lump removed, also. Then I had a bicornuate uterus, also, so I had three surgeries to prep after I knew that I had the healthy embryos.
Dr. Aimee: Now with the remaining embryos, what plans do you have for them?
Abbey LeVine: I had to move the embryos from Wendy’s reproductive endocrinologist, which I have a video of. A little bit of it is in the Good Morning America piece, but there is a whole half-hour video of us. A friend of mine was in town, and we moved these seven embryos across town in a freezer. It’s so wild. I don’t really look at my daughter Gala and think of this often at all, but when I talk about it like this, it’s wild that she was a cluster of cells in a freezer that I moved in a van across town, in a Lyft across town.
Then I had one unsuccessful implantation of two embryos. I implanted two embryos in November 2018, and they didn’t take. Then Christmas came around, so I couldn’t implant again. I was so impatient. Everything in the process is such a waiting game. There are so many steps in this process and it’s all so emotional.
When I did the second implantation, I was going to have a lot more fun. So I’m single, and I actually went out on a date with a guy. I got implanted on a Saturday and went out on a Tuesday, and I ended up dating him for six months even when I was pregnant, which was super fun. He knew the whole story and he was never going to be the dad. But I do believe that letting go of the outcome helped me bring the second pregnancy to viability.
So, all these crazy magical things started coming out of my life once I decided to do the implantation. That’s the other piece of it.
I never even answered your question. I’m sorry. The answer to the question is then there were three embryos left because I implanted two and then two. There were three left, and they got on a jet plane and flew to San Diego. I gifted them to my friend who wants to remain anonymous. She now has a daughter who is Gala’s biological sister. Her situation is very different from mine. She’s engaged and they tried a couple of times. It just didn’t work out for them, and this was sort of an easy option for her.
Gala and her sister look so much alike. They have met twice and while they don’t understand their biological connection yet, I do gently drop that they are “sisters”, because they are. I hope that they have a nice relationship. We’ve joked a lot that when they’re 21 we’ll take them to Paris and go out dancing.
Dr. Aimee: I love it. You guys must have so much fun together. I have goosebumps just hearing your story. I don’t know. You can probably see the hair on my arms. It’s such a beautiful story.
What reaction have you gotten from people about this? So much about your story shifts how many people have thought about family. I think what you’re doing brings more awareness about embryo donation. What kind of reactions are you getting from people?
Abbey LeVine: I decided a while ago not to give an eff about what anyone said. That’s how I live my life. That’s the first thing, I think, laying that groundwork. It is respectful. Other people can have families that are nuclear. I didn’t love how the nuclear family worked for me growing up. I didn’t love it when I was in a relationship. I hope there is some other strange evolution of family for me besides me and my daughter in the future. I hear a lot that people admire my bravery and my strength. People say this to me often, and it doesn’t occur to me until people really say that to me, I guess.
I love being a mom. It brings me immense joy. I would not have stopped trying. If I hadn’t gotten pregnant for some reason, I would have gone back and reexamined either foster care, foster to adopt, or I would have explored adoption after the embryo donation.
I actually don’t think I’ve had one single negative reaction. Not to my face. People admire me for being a single mom by choice. But I also wear my journey as a badge of courage. I give people the facts right up front and I tell them because there’s a part of me that kind of likes shocking people, to be really honest. Also, I’m really proud to be a trailblazer in this field and to be able to be first. I’m not first, but I feel first. I’m definitely first in a lot of my circles. I am also trying to change the narrative about being a single mom. I am tired of the “struggling waitress, impoverished mom” trope about single mothers. I am much happier and more abundant than I could have ever imagined. Gala and I are thriving.
Before COVID, I had a lot of women who wanted to come and stay with me to help, but also I think they were single women who were kind of curious about how this was all working and how I was doing. I’m not going to lie; I am exhausted. I work full-time and my daughter is in school during the week.
I tell people a lot that Gala doesn’t have a dad and she’s a double donor. If you don’t know what that means, I’m happy to answer any questions. Some women who are on the journey tend to be really sensitive about it, so I don’t push it. I don’t push the idea because I really am a big fan of embryo donation and egg donation.
I don’t know how much you talk about this, but I think at 39, 40, 41, 42, women really think that they can still really have kids. I don’t think there’s enough literature and truth-telling out there. I get it, also, because I think that people have to try. I had to try, I had to have three IUIs with the guy that I was dating that I thought was going to be the dad, but that was $10,000 and a year-and-a-half. I never did IVF. I didn’t have insurance, my business isn’t like that, so I never had that chance to really try through insurance.
The minute that I turned 45, my doctor in Manhattan said, “There’s no more chances for you. I’m not taking your $30,000 to try to pull an egg to try this.” I kind of feel like people should be aware of that sooner. That’s why I’ve become an embryo and egg donor advocate because I want people to ask me questions. In the end, I have the most amazing daughter. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, everyone loves her, and she’s smart.
This is a little woo-woo, but I think that the body is just the vessel for the soul. We try so hard to have our own biology. By the way, she has the same hair color as me and we look alike; we totally grew to look alike. I’m curious to know what you say about genetics. I’m raising her, so she’s just like me. I think that the biology of it all is just oversold.
Dr. Aimee: I have patients where I’ve used an egg donor and then they come back to me and they’re like, “Are you sure that you didn’t somehow use my egg? Because my child looks and acts and I just feel like she came from me.” They did. Same with embryo donors. I’ve had patients share with double donor embryos and they’re like, “I don’t understand how magical this is.” “Had I known, I would have done it sooner,” is something that I hear from people as well.
Obviously, this experience sounds like it has changed you in many ways. It turned you into a mother, first and foremost. You’ve also created something that I’d love for you to share. You created Momma By Design. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Abbey LeVine: The way that I found support in this journey when I was getting all these surgeries on my uterus was I started a Facebook Group for myself called Abbey’s Uterus Fan Club. I invited my friends and family to join it and it became a place where I could post my journey and ask for support on my progress. It really helped me cheer myself on, and my friends and family all helped create the possibility that I could make my dreams a reality. I needed it to be fun because I really was sinking low into thinking this was never going to happen, and I had to recover for six months from fibroid surgery. I feel like we all need a destination for sisterhood and questions around this process.
To be frank, I’ve wanted to blow the fertility field up and make this my whole business. I just haven’t had the time to do that. I want to invite people to come check out my journey because I still pinch myself every single day that I get to be a mom. I say gratitudes in the morning, and we say gratitudes together before we go to bed. I don’t take any of this for granted.
What I hope Momma By Design becomes is a destination for curious women about egg and embryo donation. I want to normalize this idea that it’s okay to not have a child biologically and still carry it. I’m so grateful that I got to carry a child. I really wanted to do that, but also, I didn’t really want to do that until I was truly prepared to be a mother, which, for me, was after my healthy egg producing years.
There are so many secrets. People don’t talk about the fact that they go to fertility. There are no uterine health conversations going on, and that’s a huge part of this.
A lot of times, we’re doing this with a partner. I luckily did all of my fertility with the guy that I thought I was going to then maybe have a baby with, so I wasn’t ever actually alone. But the second I got pregnant, I was by myself, choosing to be a solo parent.
This has actually become an expression of “look at us.” That’s sort of how it started because I wanted people to see what we were up to because I think it’s kind of remarkable.
Dr. Aimee: I’d have to agree. You talk about normalizing things, especially the conversation around embryo donation. Can you share some of the most common misconceptions that people have about embryo donation?
Abbey LeVine: I’ve had so few conversations about this with people that I’m not sure how the public feels about it. I spoke to a friend from high school who has a child and is the same age as me – I’m going to be 51 in October, so she’s 51. Her husband really wants to have a baby that’s biologically theirs.
I think that the misconception about not feeling attached to a child is discussed a lot. I don’t have that little voice that says I need to pass my own biology on. Gala has my last name. I’m telling you, she’s just exactly like me, we’re two peas in a pod. I don’t feel that there is any lack of family relation.
The idea is to create a life so fabulous that she’s going to feel even better than anyone, she’s going to feel as loved or more than other families. She’ll have aunties. Hopefully, we’ll travel a lot. She’s going to love how she came into existence, I hope. If not, I’ll deal with that. That part I don’t know yet.
Dr. Aimee: I’m just curious. What is Spread the Sparkle? Can you share that with us? I love that name and your charity.
Abbey LeVine: Spread the Sparkle started on Christmas in 2014 because I felt like there was more that I could be doing on Christmas Day because I’m Jewish. I felt that it was my calling to start a nonprofit. It’s a 501c3 where we have events on Christmas Day for women and kids who have survived domestic violence. It was another way for me to sort of have family and create family for myself and other people. Being of service on that particular day felt really great for a while.
We’ve had six big parties on Christmas Day at a beautiful studio called Home Studios in Manhattan. They have been amazing, they donate the space to us on Christmas Day. We get donations from people, individuals, and we’re always looking for money. We get catering, Santa Claus, gifts for all of the kids, and gifts for all the moms. We spoil the moms, we do nails and fun things. We do crafts with the kids, cookie making, and photo booths.
Actually, there are some men, too. It’s women, kids, and men who have survived domestic violence. So, we Spread the Sparkle.
We’re always looking to expand. We didn’t get to do it last year. We’re kind of examining how we can keep doing it because it has been great. It’s all volunteers. There’s a board of directors and we’re just all volunteers that work to put it together.
It’s funny that you were so interested in it because it’s another way that I created a family.
Dr. Aimee: Is there anything else that you want to share with us today?
Abbey LeVine: It’s so hard to explain the pain of fertility. You can listen to a million podcasts and still feel alone in it. I don’t think there is any way to comfort somebody going through fertility, just knowing that they don’t know the outcome. At the same time, you have to keep believing that it’s going to happen.
The two-week wait is so wild because you have to think that you’re pregnant. There’s this mental gymnastics that goes on with fertility, it’s excruciating. I just want to honor everybody who is tuning in and who are going through it and just say that you don’t have to be happy, you don’t have to tell anyone what’s going on, and you don’t have to keep believing. You can take breaks.
I do want to give a tiny bit of advice. Just keep options open and keep asking questions. I recently talked to my reproductive endocrinologist, and he was like, “You did not stop. You were not ever going to stop.” My response to that was I didn’t know there was an option to stop. For me, I just adapted until I got an outcome, a child. It was never an option for me to stop, but also I didn’t have a ton of money and I didn’t have a ton of options.
That’s what I want to say. There are ways. If you’re thinking about embryo donation or egg donation and you’re not sure, please reach out to me on Instagram @MommaByDesign. And Dr. Aimee is amazing. I’ve seen all of your press and what your messaging is on. I know it’s hard to believe people. I feel like it’s hard to believe what other people are saying when you’re going through it.
Anyway, that was a lot. I feel you, girls. It is F’ing hard. Keep doing it if you want to have a family and you have the calling.
Dr. Aimee: Thank you, Abbey. That was beautiful. Thank you for joining us today. I’ll be following you on @MommaByDesign as well and looking for all of your family updates. Thank you again for all that you’re doing to empower people to help them make decisions that ultimately could be what I say, Plan B is the plan that was meant to be.
Abbey LeVine: Oh. Love it. I say I’m egging you on to get a donor egg. I love it. Thank you for all of the work that you’re doing. You’re really a genius.
Dr. Aimee: Thank you.
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