Our Test-Tube Baby Was An Accident

Here’s the thing about life: It’s unpredictable on even the best of days. If you’re like me, not every event of your life was necessarily premeditated, especially when things like youth and carelessness are factored into the equation. Given how much unconditional love I have for my young son, Jayden, you’d never guess that my girlfriend’s pregnancy was unplanned. I don’t feel proud saying this, but it’s time the truth came out: Our test-tube baby was an accident.

Like a certain percentage of men, back in my pre-parenthood days, I tended to be a bit slipshod when it came to birth control. My girlfriend, Maggie, and I probably played even more fast and loose than others. After all, her underdeveloped fallopian tubes made pregnancy a pretty unlikely scenario.

So one afternoon, she and I ended up doing what young couples sometimes do when alcohol and raging libidos get the better of each other. We paid a visit to a local clinic, dropped down $12,000, and began an intensive, medically supervised in-vitro fertilization procedure.

Now, before you judge me, understand that at this point in our lives, the two of us were still brimming with the unstoppable confidence of youth. We genuinely didn’t see any harm in having a technician retrieve several of Maggie’s eggs through an ultrasound-guided needle, nor did we anticipate that using an intracytoplasmic injection technique to blend them with my sperm for 18 hours at a ratio of 1 to 75,000 could lead to an eventual pregnancy. We were just two crazy kids having fun on a Saturday. You know how it is.

When we accidentally returned to the clinic three days later, it appeared Maggie’s now-fertilized eggs had begun to grow as zygotes. In the throes of our mid-Tuesday morning passion, she and I really weren’t paying much mind to Dr. Wyner, who began transferring the genetic material from the petri dish into her uterus through a coude-tipped catheter. That was just how we rolled back then.

Not unlike the young rabble-rousers who brazenly down mojito after mojito at the club each night, we honestly thought nothing of the two subsequent weeks Maggie spent ingesting an intricate cocktail of synthesized hormones to ensure the newly formed embryo attached itself to her uterine wall. Like you’ve never experimented with drugs before.

And then, the unthinkable: The next thing we knew, Maggie was pregnant. Just like that. Believe me, nobody was more shocked than we were. Talk about your dumb luck. I’ve never been much into statistics, but the truth of the matter is that nearly 50 percent of all women will have at least one unplanned pregnancy over the course of their reproductive years, so at least we can take solace in the fact there must be countless other test-tube babies out there who are happy heat-of-the-moment accidents, just like our beloved Jayden. It just goes to show that one reckless little slip-up is all it takes to change your life forever.

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