We went to work in Los Angeles, rented a house there, filmed projects, lived a fun life up in the hills, with a pool, a convertible sports car. Our shape now of a hopeful, creative, unfettered, adventurous, outward-looking, energised couple. But this shape could not last. We had to reshape ourselves to the realities of our lives.

And Emma now divorced, we decided it was time to come back home. After three years together, it was time to settle. It was, we decided, time to start a family.

Then the next grief hit us.

We were unable to conceive. And Emma was fast approaching 40.

It is one of those major marking points, the end of one way of looking at life, as it is a death, in a way – a death of a possibility, a death of a new shape that had been expected, and brought both a profound grief and a deep sense of shame in its wake. A shame borne by both me and Emma, as we saw ourselves as unable to fulfill our purest and most natural role in life – to procreate.

We hit an existential crisis – it’s a given, all the stories we had read as children, telling us that girls grow up to become mothers; boys, fathers – Emma was, therefore, not a proper woman and I was not a proper man.

Four weeks before we welcomed in the new millennium, we celebrated the arrival of our beautiful, healthy baby daughter Gaia, whom we’d first seen at four-cells old. Our shape had changed once more: we were now awestruck, doting parents.

The most difficult decision we had yet had to make. No result, nothing tangible, it just stopped. It had failed. Rationally, it was the only decision we could have come to – emotionally, it was untenable. We were dislocated, isolated in our overwhelming grief. I now know we were slipping into complicated grief.

Even though there can be no set timescale for processing, the myriad of feelings within the grief can expand themselves into our void of loss and become a chronic problem. This grief can consume our lives.

The precision of the grief, the focus of the loss, muddies and seeps out and, over time, if not addressed, metamorphoses into major depression. This is where it took us, an overbearing blanket of sadness covering the two of us. And we both felt so alone; we couldn’t address it as a couple, we didn’t seek help together.

The awkward truth for the purveyors of IVF is the fact that we are all embryos who have grown up, and if all men are created equal, then all embryos are human beings, each of whom ought to be unconditionally safeguarded and never exploited.

The collateral damage problem means that in order to achieve one IVF birth, clinic workers may create a dozen embryos, prescreen and transfer several of the “best” ones, discard or freeze the "leftovers", and if more than one implants successfully, selectively abort the additional fetus(es). Those IVF-produced babies who manage to run this gauntlet and cross the threshold of birth still manifest elevated rates of birth defects when compared to normally-conceived babies, another instance of collateral damage.

This high tolerance for collateral damage in IVF clinics and among IVF customers arises out of the intentional prioritization of the desires of older, more powerful and wealthy adults over the rights and needs of voiceless embryonic children. Parental wants are always assumed by the industry to trump their children’s best interests, allowing for grave human rights violations to become “standards of infertility care."

Even if parts of society assert otherwise, sex remains fundamentally about bringing forth the next generation of human life within the stable bond of marriage. Children are not commodities and are entitled to be brought into the world through the loving embrace of the marital act, and within the protective and loving environment of the maternal womb, rather than being manufactured and manhandled under laboratory lights by hired hands in fertility clinics.

Through IVF, we create an "exploitable subclass" — those who, although they are just as human as the rest of us, are unjustly instrumentalized and dehumanized by being brought into the world in a manner distinct from the rest of us. This subclass is produced and subjugated through human craftiness and scheming, instead of arriving as free and undeserved gifts through the bodily self-surrender and fruitful spousal love of the marital embrace.

We went to work in Los Angeles, rented a house there, filmed projects, lived a fun life up in the hills, with a pool, a convertible sports car. Our shape now of a hopeful, creative, unfettered, adventurous, outward-looking, energised couple. But this shape could not last. We had to reshape ourselves to the realities of our lives.

And Emma now divorced, we decided it was time to come back home. After three years together, it was time to settle. It was, we decided, time to start a family.

Then the next grief hit us.

We were unable to conceive. And Emma was fast approaching 40.

It is one of those major marking points, the end of one way of looking at life, as it is a death, in a way – a death of a possibility, a death of a new shape that had been expected, and brought both a profound grief and a deep sense of shame in its wake. A shame borne by both me and Emma, as we saw ourselves as unable to fulfill our purest and most natural role in life – to procreate.

We hit an existential crisis – it’s a given, all the stories we had read as children, telling us that girls grow up to become mothers; boys, fathers – Emma was, therefore, not a proper woman and I was not a proper man.

Four weeks before we welcomed in the new millennium, we celebrated the arrival of our beautiful, healthy baby daughter Gaia, whom we’d first seen at four-cells old. Our shape had changed once more: we were now awestruck, doting parents.

The most difficult decision we had yet had to make. No result, nothing tangible, it just stopped. It had failed. Rationally, it was the only decision we could have come to – emotionally, it was untenable. We were dislocated, isolated in our overwhelming grief. I now know we were slipping into complicated grief.

Even though there can be no set timescale for processing, the myriad of feelings within the grief can expand themselves into our void of loss and become a chronic problem. This grief can consume our lives.

The precision of the grief, the focus of the loss, muddies and seeps out and, over time, if not addressed, metamorphoses into major depression. This is where it took us, an overbearing blanket of sadness covering the two of us. And we both felt so alone; we couldn’t address it as a couple, we didn’t seek help together.

The awkward truth for the purveyors of IVF is the fact that we are all embryos who have grown up, and if all men are created equal, then all embryos are human beings, each of whom ought to be unconditionally safeguarded and never exploited.

The collateral damage problem means that in order to achieve one IVF birth, clinic workers may create a dozen embryos, prescreen and transfer several of the “best” ones, discard or freeze the "leftovers", and if more than one implants successfully, selectively abort the additional fetus(es). Those IVF-produced babies who manage to run this gauntlet and cross the threshold of birth still manifest elevated rates of birth defects when compared to normally-conceived babies, another instance of collateral damage.

This high tolerance for collateral damage in IVF clinics and among IVF customers arises out of the intentional prioritization of the desires of older, more powerful and wealthy adults over the rights and needs of voiceless embryonic children. Parental wants are always assumed by the industry to trump their children’s best interests, allowing for grave human rights violations to become “standards of infertility care."

Even if parts of society assert otherwise, sex remains fundamentally about bringing forth the next generation of human life within the stable bond of marriage. Children are not commodities and are entitled to be brought into the world through the loving embrace of the marital act, and within the protective and loving environment of the maternal womb, rather than being manufactured and manhandled under laboratory lights by hired hands in fertility clinics.

Through IVF, we create an "exploitable subclass" — those who, although they are just as human as the rest of us, are unjustly instrumentalized and dehumanized by being brought into the world in a manner distinct from the rest of us. This subclass is produced and subjugated through human craftiness and scheming, instead of arriving as free and undeserved gifts through the bodily self-surrender and fruitful spousal love of the marital embrace.