mom to be could barely believe what she was seeing when she went for an ultrasound to get a closer look at her unborn twins.
Michelle de Bruijn, from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, was 14 weeks pregnant when she underwent the scan. What she saw in that brief moment brought tears to her eyes. “It was just so heartwarming to see that happening,” De Bruijn told Newsweek. “This moment felt particularly meaningful because I chose to walk this journey solo.”
At age 39, De Bruijn decided to become a solo mother by choice (SMC). Today, a significant number of women are choosing to follow a similar path. Figures published on the website singlemothersbychoice.org show that, in 2022, 54 percent of private customers at Cryos’ Sperm and Egg Bank were SMCs.
De Bruijn took a slightly different path, though, one that she said “wasn’t straightforward.” She added: “I received some pretty devastating news from my fertility doctors. They told me I had reduced fertility due to low Anti-Müllerian Hormone.”
AMH is the hormone produced by the ovaries that serves as an indication of the number of eggs a woman has. De Bruijn’s results suggested a very low egg count. She was told she needed to start trying immediately. It could take “up to a year or possibly longer” to conceive.
De Bruijn was devastated. “When I asked what I could do about it, they basically said, ‘Nothing. This is it. And you’re 39, so you’re old,” she said. “At that moment, my tears turned to anger.”
De Bruijn was determined to prove them wrong, so, rather than use a fertility clinic, she took “complete control” of her journey. She spent the next six months reading up on all things fertility and focusing on preparing her body for the process.
“I became pregnant through donor conception with a known donor,” De Bruijn said. “I also wanted full control over choosing my donor. I really wanted to get to know him personally, so I met my incredible donor through an app, basically Tinder for sperm donation.”
Incredibly, De Bruijn’s approach paid dividends. “I got pregnant with twins on my first try,” she said. “My due date is February 2, but, since I’m carrying twins, they’ll likely arrive at least two weeks earlier.”
In most cases, discovering you were having twins would be a surprise, but not to De Bruijn. She had been carefully monitoring her Human Chorionic Gonadotropin and progesterone levels during her pregnancy and, having noticed both were high, knew there was a good chance.
“By the time I got my first ultrasound around six weeks, I was pretty confident about what we’d find,” De Bruijn said. “When they were confirmed as twins, I felt incredibly grateful. It felt magical, honestly.”
There was something equally magical to come at the recent ultrasound scan, though. De Bruijn has been sharing her journey to TikTok under the handle @iammichelledebruijn so she thought nothing of sharing the footage online.
The post captures the sight that greeted her that day. Her two unborn babies were lying face to face, and then one of the two leaned in to give the other a kiss. “You just witnessed their first act of love,” De Bruijn wrote on the video.
@iammichelledebruijn Two healthy babies 🥰 #pregnanttiktok #zwangerschap #tweeling #twin #echo #zwanger ♬ Je te laisserai des mots – Patrick Watson
That moment made her feel understandably emotional. It felt like a validation of her choice of donor. “I wanted someone who would be as committed, caring, and loving about this process as I am, and that’s really hard to find,” De Bruijn said.
“When I eventually found that person, I knew this wasn’t going to be just a transaction. These babies were made out of love, out of presence, out of care and intention. So, to witness these two little creatures expressing love to each other in the womb was just out of this world.”
De Bruijn is delighted the video of her special scan has gone viral, amassing over 184,000 views. She hopes that clip and the others she posts inspire other women to follow a similar fertility path. She said: “One diagnosis or one number said by a fertility doctor isn’t a life sentence.”