‘I want my late husband’s children’: the fight for posthumous conception

Three widows have been brought together through their battle for the right to have their partners’ children. But should it be a decision for the courts?

Beneath the gloomy gothic archways of the Royal Courts of Justice’s court 33, Samantha Jefferies is fighting the government for the right to have her husband’s baby. Barristers for both sides have made their case and Judge Sir James Munby, president of the family division of the high court, has given her the chance to have the last word. “I’m crossing my fingers that the right decision will be reached at the end, and it’s quite clear what that would be,” Jefferies says, her voice small but calm. “I want my late husband’s children.”

At 42, Jefferies feels she is too young to be a widow, and too young to give up on her dream of being the mother of her husband Clive’s babies. It’s a dream that is tantalisingly close to becoming reality: there are three tiny embryos made from his sperm and her eggs in a freezer in a Sussex clinic, created before Clive died suddenly in 2014. But the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has argued that they are being stored illegally, and should be defrosted and left to perish. For the courts, the embryos are a legal conundrum. For Jefferies, they are her last chance of having the family she always wanted.

Some people were saying, ‘Why don’t you just go out and get yourself pregnant?'

It was a bit like being a big sister: I could understand quite a lot of what she was going through

I’m upfront with guys. ‘I’ve got embryos in storage, and I’m going to have children within the next three years’

It wasn’t about him, although I knew that’s what he wanted. There were two bereavements: one for him and one for my life

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The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy review – a memoir of wanting too much

The New Yorker writer had a life that balanced domesticity with intellectual and sexual adventure. Then it fell apart

Ariel Levy’s new memoir begins with a description of disorientation. “For the first time I can remember, I cannot locate my competent self,” she writes. “In the last few months, I have lost my son, my spouse, and my house. Every morning I wake up and for a few seconds I’m disoriented, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life.” In the book that follows, Levy examines the choices that brought her to this point of collapse. Was she the agent of her own destruction? Did she ask too much of life?

The story of how Levy lost her son was first published in the New Yorker in 2013. A staff writer for the magazine, she had a miscarriage in a hotel room while on assignment in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, when she was 19 weeks pregnant. Her son was born alive, but did not survive; Levy held him in her hand as he died. She spent a night in the hospital, then returned home to New York with “a longing – ferocious, primal, limitless, crazed – for the only person I had ever made”.

Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules

The compassion Levy does not give to herself is left to the reader, who will feel it on her behalf

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First licence to create three-person baby granted by UK fertility regulator

Doctors at a Newcastle clinic have been given the first licence to create babies with DNA from three people

Doctors in Newcastle have been granted permission to use the three-person baby fertility technique, which can prevent incurable genetic diseases being inherited by children.

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Makers of thalidomide to be tried - archive, 1967

15 March 1967: The German manufacturers of the anti-morning sickness pill were accused of causing at least 5,000 babies to be born malformed

Bonn, March 14
After an investigation lasting five years, the Public Prosecutor at Aachen has brought charges against the manufacturers of the drug thalidomide which is blamed for causing at least 5,000 babies to be born malformed and nervous disorders in 5,000 adults.

The case against the managing director and eight other executives of the pharmaceutical firm, Grünenthal, of Stolberg, near Aachen, is expected to begin in about a year’s time and to last for a year. The charge sheet includes allegations of manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, and infringement of the West German pharmaceutical laws.

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‘All my friends had some nightmare experience trying to get pregnant. My story took the cake’

At five months pregnant, Ariel Levy lost her baby. After another four years of IVF, had she left motherhood too late?

I first met Ariel Levy in 2009, soon after moving from London to New York, but I had been a fan for more than a decade. Her frank articles about pop culture and sex, which she wrote in her first job at New York magazine from the late 1990s, provided the template of what I wanted to write one day. Her 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, a blistering look at how young women were being sold the lie that emulating pole dancers and Paris Hilton was empowering, became one of the defining feminist statements of that decade. At the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008, she breaks up the magazine’s occasional aridity with vivid articles about sexuality and gender. (She got her job when she told editor David Remnick that, “If aliens had only the New Yorker to go by, they would conclude that human beings didn’t care that much about sex, which they actually do.”)

Heroes rarely live up to your fantasies, but Levy exceeded them. Usually we’d go out for drinks – cocktails that knocked me sideways, but barely seemed to touch her sides – and from the start she struck me as being just like her writing: laid-back, wise, curious, kind. Sometimes Levy’s wife, Lucy, would join us. “Isn’t she hilarious?” Levy would say after Lucy had said something that wasn’t, actually, all that funny, but I envied them their mutual devotion after almost a decade together. I, by contrast, was lonely and, like generations of single women in their mid-30s before me, starting to panic. But like a lot of women of my particular generation, I felt ashamed of this. Panicking about not having a baby? How retrograde. So I never admitted any of it to Levy, who seemed more likely to eat her own hair than indulge in such uncool, unfeminist thoughts.

I don’t hear less privileged women thinking they’re entitled to everything, whenever they want it. The body doesn’t play by those rules

Levy got in touch with an ex, only to find she was now a trans man. He wanted a baby, using his eggs and her uterus

I wonder sometimes if my grief is disproportionate, inappropriate

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Why don’t India’s feminists call out doctors doing unnecessary C-sections? | Mari Marcel Thekaekara

Caesareans have turned into a moneymaking racket. Surely, on International Women’s Day, we should be talking about pregnant women’s rights

In India, childbirth has turned into a moneymaking racket, with caesarean sections pushed by unscrupulous medical practitioners in search of profit. Healthy young women who could easily have had normal, natural deliveries are lied to, told that they and their babies are at risk, and advised to have invasive surgery. Worried families feel helpless and afraid to refuse doctors’ orders. Thousands of women in even the smallest towns are put through this ordeal for no medical reason at all.

Until 2010, C-sections were limited to 8.5% of all deliveries in India, just under the recommended level of 10-15%, according to a World Health Organisation report. However, during the past decade the numbers have shot up. In Kerala, India’s most educated, aware state, 41% of deliveries are C-sections and Tamil Nadu, another relatively well-off state, has 58% of its deliveries by C-section, reports the ICMR School of Public Health. Major cities in particular have seen an exponential growth in C-sections in both private and public hospitals, while one study revealed a rise from 31% to 51% over just six years in rural Haryana.

Related: What’s next for the women’s movement?

Related: Women lead the way on a tour of northern India

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Pregnancy sickness can kill – why are doctors so uninformed about it? | Caitlin Dean

The agony of hyperemesis gravidarum can drive expectant mothers to terminate. That’s because the support they desperately need is still lacking

During my first pregnancy, I fully expected to glow and bloom. I was going to eat healthy, organic food, and exercise to nurture the life growing inside me. I never imagined that by week 10 I would look up the number for an abortion clinic from a bed where I had been a prisoner for two months, bar the days spent in hospital on a drip. I suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum and for me pregnancy is life threatening.

Hyperemesis is not just normal waves of nausea and occasional vomiting that most women experience in early pregnancy. It is nausea so intense and all-consuming you feel like you’ve been poisoned. It is vomiting so relentlessly that your throat bleeds and your stomach muscles tear. It is a sense of smell so powerful and warped that your partner can’t come near enough to offer comfort without making you retch. I could not swallow my own saliva without puking it back up.

Related: It costs £83 to treat postnatal depression. So why must so many women suffer? | Vonny Moyes

It’s not all doom and gloom – dedicated hyperemesis day units are springing up across the UK

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