Hats off to New York Post for making it through this interview. I honestly don’t know what I would have done in their position, but I imagine the police and CPS would be involved. I’m going to give you guys a trigger warning—This story is pretty upsetting for so many reasons. Mainly, because it involves a little boy, whose parents openly admit they didn’t want him.
Well, let’s get into it…
A lesbian couple in New York is suing the CNY Fertility Clinic after they conceived and gave birth to a healthy baby. Why? Because he’s a boy. Heather Wilhelm-Routenberg and Robin (Robbie) Routenberg-Wilhelm were bewildered when they learned at the 15-week appointment that they were having a boy. They went to the CNY clinic because they allegedly guaranteed them a girl.
Heather (the one who carried the little boy) said she fell raped after learning she was having a boy. According to her, she fell into a deep depression and became suicidal after giving birth.
At first, Heather was in denial. This had to be a mixup.
“I looked at Robbie and said, ‘What’s if it’s not yours — who is in my body?!’ That’s when I flipped out, that’s when I felt my body was taken hostage,” Heather told Amy Klein at the post. “I assumed it was someone else’s embryo, not the wrong embryo of ours.”
“It scared the s*** out of me. I don’t know how to explain this — it felt like there was an alien living inside of me,” she continued. “I said to Robbie, “If this is someone else’s kid, we will have to give it back.”
The OB offered to abort her baby but Heather says her denial made her keep the baby. She thought that she would be able to trade the baby after birth for a girl that she believed was incriminated in someone else by mistake.
“We scheduled an ultrasound for the next day,” Heather said. “That was the worst night of my life. I had this overwhelming sense of immobility. I remember lying in my bedroom, thinking, ‘This can’t be happening!’ Not only was the baby in my body not ours, but the baby in my body was male and he was put there against my will, just like rape.”
Heather is reportedly the survivor of two sexual assults which is the primary reason the couple did not want a boy—Not the only reason, though.
“We didn’t want to have a boy because of the assaults and because of the socialization of boys — there’s constant socialization of what it means to be a ‘real man,’” Heather told Klein. “People say, ‘Oh, he’s a boy, let him hit you,’ and all the camouflage and guns don’t help. It reinforces masculinity, and that’s a reminder of the assaults every time.”
Heather never made plans on having the boy because he was obviously someone else’s problem. She waited for biological tests.
“During that time, I had no connection to the baby inside — I figured I would be giving it away to its real parents. I tried not to think about being pregnant,” she recalled.
The day finally came when the couple received a biological test to prove that this was not their baby, but… He was.
“That was the most isolating thing — that we had a healthy baby, but I had no emotional connection and now I had to wrap my head around having a child forever that I wasn’t planning on,” Heather told the Post.
“The whole pregnancy, I couldn’t connect to the baby. I hate saying that. It’s painful. It was a terrible experience.”
Heather also admitted that even after the little boy was born, she felt nothing for him.
“I started experiencing extreme anxiety. I would look at the baby and it would contort into the faces of all these grown men that I know,” Heather said. “It was so creepy. Whenever that happened, I had to give the baby to Robbie.”
She continued, “I literally thought I was going insane. There were several incidences of suicidal ideation, some of which were very dangerous. I had complex postpartum depression.”
Heather admits she doesn’t feel as strongly against the boy, “He’s a lovely kid,” she said. “He smiles just like Robbie, he has Robbie’s dimples, and that makes it easier…he’s been an easy baby.”
But even his beautiful smile doesn’t take away the dread the couple feels.
“We both love our child but we have had to work harder than anyone should have to work to make sure we are all alive,” she added.
What the heck does that even mean? As the parent of boys and girls, I’ve got news for them—They’re all work. This whole thing seems petty, sexist, and disturbing.