Heather Dubrow Defends Chrissy Teigen for Choosing Her Baby's Sex
The #RHOC mom knows what it's like to go through IVF.
When Chrissy Teigen opened up about her decision to choose a female embryo while undergoing in vitro fertilization, she didn't expect it to cause as much controversy as it did. However, the new cookbook author has a 'Wife in her corner: Heather Dubrow.
The Real Housewives of Orange County mom defended Chrissy on Twitter Wedneday in response to one Twitter user who wrote to them, "@chrissyteigen ur IVF is ur business. @HeatherDubrow said it best on her podcast-'the choice was either going to be mine or the lab guy's!'"
In fact, she opened up about her own struggles with infertility and her IVF journey during the most recent installment of her Heather Dubrow's World podcast. After trying for a baby with husband Terry Dubrow for about two years with no success, the couple got tested and found out that Heather had unexplained infertility. She took fertility drugs, had injections, and underwent IUI, but nothing worked.
Heather finally decided to undergo IVF to try and get pregnant, which resulted in her getting pregnant with triplets, but then she unfortunately lost one of the babies, a girl. Still, Heather successfully gave birth to twins Nicholas and Maximillia. About a year-and-a-half later, Heather and Terry decided to have another baby through IVF, this time just one, and they experienced the exact same situation as Chrissy and her hubby John Legend when it came to choosing the sex of their baby.
"So when we did the IVF, we ended up with three embryos. And then the question is what do you do?" Heather explained during her podcast. "This is what's so strange about doing fertility because you have to make all of these decisions, and you don't want to play God, but you are already playing God because you're doing the surgeries and putting eggs and sperm together where it wasn't coming together inside of you naturally, so where do you draw the line?"
Heather knew she just wanted the healthiest, strongest embryo out of the trio, but after having a boy and a girl already, she and Terry didn't want to have to choose the sex. "So the lab knew the sexes of the baby, but I didn't. So I said, 'Put in the strongest one.' They went, 'Um, well. Two of them are kind of neck and neck.' And I went, 'Oh, great,'" she said. "So Terry and I had to have a conversation about it."
Heather and Terry ultimately came to an important realization about the whole IVF process. "Well, I mean, at some point, are you going to let the lab guy decide what you're having or are you gonna decide? But that is the choice. Either the lab guy's going to pick a boy or a girl. That's not God's will," she said. "So we talked about it and I come from a family of sisters. And I guess maybe because the one we had lost was a girl, it was on my mind still and so we put this girl embryo in, and we got Katarina."
And then a few years later, Heather surprisingly got pregnant naturally and gave birth to her fourth child Coco. However, she still receives a bill for freezing her remaining two embryos at the fertility clinic, and she is undecided about what she's going to do with them.
No matter what Heather decides to do with her embryos, they'll always be memorialized in the design of this beautiful etched glass window in her new home.
Check out Chateau Dubrow while it was still under construction, below.
