Michel Janse accidentally found out she was an IVF baby. Her TikTok post about considering carrying her parents' extra embryos went viral.
Courtesy of Jessie Jean Photography
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Michel Janse, a 26-year-old living in San Diego. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I found out I was an IVF baby when my dad let it slip at a restaurant over dinner without my mom's permission. We had been talking about pregnancy, and he mentioned in passing that I had been hard to conceive and that I had been a petri-dish baby — though he might not have used those exact words. I was confused about what that even meant.
"We just didn't want you to feel weird," I remember my mom saying. "But I guess you know now. Just don't tell your sister."
My sister is three years younger than me, and there was no way I could keep this secret from her.
Even though my parents stayed pretty hush-hush about it, both my sister and I thought it was cool. Science is awesome; my parents really wanted to have us, and it worked.
My sister and I immediately started considering how we had been from the same batch. At the time, I thought about how wild it was that I was randomly picked as the older sister. I now know they implant the higher-rated embryos first — which I incessantly joke about with her.
Being an IVF baby didn't affect my sense of self growing up, so it never made sense to me why in vitro fertilization was something my parents wanted to keep quiet. That's until I learned some Christian circles viewed IVF fertility treatments as not in line with their religious values — they think you're trying to play God.
While my parents, Christians themselves, disagreed with this line of thinking, they didn't want to broadcast to everyone that they had struggled with infertility for seven years before choosing IVF.
When I got married at 21, I worried that I, too, might struggle with infertility, so I had testing done. I was told I shouldn't have any problem having my own children.
About the same time, I started to wonder whether it would be possible to implant one of the frozen embryos from my parents into me if I ever struggled with infertility. I wasn't seriously considering it, but I wasn't ruling it out. Wouldn't it be weird to be a surrogate for my own sibling?
Since then, I've divorced my husband and am getting ready to be married again, at 26. It's caused me to think about pregnancy and infertility all over again, and I had the thought to share about it on TikTok.
I talked about the fact that my sister and I were pretty typical first and second children. I'm the loud one who always talked for my sister when we were kids. She was, and still is, the quieter, by-the-book one. Sometimes I wonder: If she had been born first, would she have taken on the personality I have? Would there have been a role reversal based simply on our birth order?
I also discussed what it could be like to be the surrogate to my frozen sibling embryo, which caused quite a stir.
I'd never publicly shared my thoughts about being an IVF baby and didn't expect the video to go viral. But it did, mainly because a lot of people in the comments were calling it incest that I even wondered about the possibility of using my parents' frozen embryo. I think there was a lack of scientific understanding there. They were also concerned about the genetic aspect of carrying your own genes and how that would affect the embryo.
When the video went viral, it opened up some great conversations with my parents about what to do with the remaining unused embryos. They now feel they have peace and clarity and want to move forward with embryo-adoption agencies to give others struggling with infertility the opportunity to give birth and raise a child. This would let those people avoid paying excessive fees associated with IVF. For my parents, IVF has been a way to have their own family, and now they can put up their remaining embryos for adoption.
I'm hoping they will ask for an open adoption so that I can one day meet my other siblings. I'm so curious to know what they would look and be like.
Opening up about what it's like to be an IVF baby is so important in keeping the conversation going about infertility and IVF. It shouldn't be taboo.
