Woman Believes Her Ex Should Pay For Her IVF Because He 'Stole' 10 Of Her Childbearing Years
While she may have no legal right to his money, she has a point about him taking part of her life.
Monkey Business Images | Shutterstock The end of a relationship is a hard reality to face. You’re left questioning what you want from your life and what it will look like. Suddenly, all the plans you had are irrelevant, and you have to figure out where to go from here.
One woman had to come to terms with all of this when her partner of 10 years left her for his “lifestyle.” Now that he’s leaving, she wants to pursue IVF so she can realize her dream of having a family. The only problem is that she wants him to pay for it.
The woman wants her ex to pay for her IVF.
The woman noted just how much she had sacrificed to make the relationship work in a letter to The Telegraph’s advice column. “My ex and I were not married, but we do own a flat together in which we lived and had been very much a couple for the past eight years,” she said, adding that they dated for two years prior.
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“We had agreed between us that he would maintain a high-profile career trajectory and I would support this because … I wanted to be the primary carer when we had children,” she continued. Because this woman gave up so much, and because she said that at 34 she can feel her “eggs twitching,” she wants some sort of redress from the man who is now leaving her. “I feel like he stole my childbearing years,” she insisted.
She laid out her plan. “Given I desperately want to be a mother and time is running out, I am looking into IVF so I can preserve my chances while I am still fertile,” she explained. “It is expensive. I think he should pay.”
She got plenty of sympathy from the advice columnist, but, of course, not the answer she was looking for.
Financial planner Sam Secomb is the columnist behind “Moral Money.” She noted that the woman’s situation was “desperately unfair,” but there was nothing that could be done. “Unless there is a formal legal agreement, such as marriage or civil partnership, there are no rights to financial redress for the years of emotional or practical support you gave in service of your shared plans,” she said.
She advised the woman to focus on the one thing that did legally belong to her: the flat. “If you are both on the deeds and the mortgage, you have legal rights to half of its value, regardless of who paid more,” she stated. “Second, it is important to shift your mindset from seeking compensation from him to investing in your own resilience.” Secomb added that her “story will resonate deeply” with other women.
This woman’s story brings an overlooked facet of partnership to light.
Secomb is right. It is unfair that this woman put so much time and effort into making her ex’s life successful so they could thrive as a family someday, all for him to decide it’s time to leave. However, there’s really no clear-cut answer on how to fix it. If a couple isn’t married, how do you determine how serious their plans are? There’s no way to regulate it from a legal standpoint.
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Costs for IVF vary based on a lot of different factors, but if this woman is specifically interested in freezing her eggs, CBS News reported that it can cost $12,000 to $15,000 per cycle. There’s an additional annual cost of $500 to $1,000 for the egg storage, plus $10,000 for “thawing and fertilizing the eggs later on.”
It’s not surprising that this woman would want financial compensation from her ex. She’s going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars to have children, which is money she probably doesn’t have because they were so focused on his career. But, she can’t legally make him pay for it. It’s a terrible situation, and it shows just how complicated splits can be. No one deserves to be blindsided like this.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
