Kristin Diversi always knew that she wanted to be a mother. She always wanted to be pregnant and to start a family. It was something that she had dreamed about ever since she was a little girl. When she met Blair in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they clicked immediately she knew that he was going to be the one. She knew that she wanted him to be her husband and the father of her children. They realized that they had so much in common right off the bat. “I saw he had a tattoo of the constellation Orion on the back of his neck and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s my favorite constellation. If I ever have a son, I’d like to call him Orion,’ ” Kristin opens up to PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. “And he said, ‘Me too.’ We had a baby name picked out before we even knew we were going to be together.”
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Right when they got married they wanted to have children. They didn't want to wait. They knew it might take them a few months because it was extremely rare for couples to get pregnant really quickly. They never knew the difficult road that laid in front of them though. They tried naturally for a year and a half before seeking out fertility specialists in Raleigh. Then they moved to Denver for Blair's job and talked to a fertility specialist there as well. The couple underwent six intrauterine insemination (IUI) treatments (which can cost up to a few thousand dollars per session, including medications) and even in vitro fertilization (IVF) to no avail.During this time, Kristin also discovered her eggs were testing at 10 or 15 years older than her actual age, which meant it was more difficult for her to conceive a baby.
“It was really hard — we basically then had to say goodbye to having a biological child of our own,” Kristin tells PEOPLE. “Which seems like a small thing, but I always thought I would have kids and I always thought that they would be mine. Blair and Kristin were left with three different options that they had to consider: egg adoption (adopting eggs and using the partner’s sperm), embryo adoption (adopting embryos already made from an egg and sperm) or traditional adoption. The couple decided upon embryo adoption and two embryos were transferred. “She said there was a 60 percent chance of one sticking, a 40 percent chance of both and then a less than 2 percent [chance] of triplets,” Kristin says of the transfer — and a few days later, she took a pregnancy test and it was positive: “I felt like I had just started to go down the highest part of a roller coaster.”
At 6 weeks gestation the couple found out that they were expecting twins. Then a few weeks later another baby was found. The couple would be having triplets. They were directed to a maternal fetal medicine specialist (MFM) eight weeks into her pregnancy. There, they learned that one embryo was doing great but the embryo that split was now identical twins sharing a placenta, and that one twin was “measuring more than a week behind,” a significant indicator it wouldn’t make it.“If that one didn’t make it, then they would both pass because they shared the placenta,” Kristin tells PEOPLE. “There was a good chance with that happening, they would take the third baby as well.”
“It was a really, really hard decision, especially because we really wanted babies and we would have been thrilled to have three at once,” Kristin says. “To bring a baby into the world that we knew was going to be at a major disadvantage and not have such a great life seems unfair. When the choice was in front of us, we decided to give one baby the best possible chance. The couple chose to do an embryo reduction and it was the hardest thing she has ever had to go through. The day that they were doing to reduction they measured the baby one more time it was measuring 10 days behind and was weak. He wasn't going to make it and he was going to kill the other baby. Kristin said they took a long needle and poked it into her belly to stop the babies heart. Kristin said that she cried the entire day and it still haunts her today. She feels like that's something she will never get over.
Kristen is not 25 weeks pregnant and she is doing great. The baby, which she found out was going to be a boy, is thriving and growing as he should. Kristen is really struggling with the shame and guilt of reducing her embryos. She has not received a lot of positive support.
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