Candice Huffine and Shelly Lynch-Sparks on IVF, Community, and Growing Their Family in Uncertain Times

Around three years ago, when the duo’s 15-year friendship took a turn for the romantic, Lynch-Sparks made it clear to Huffine that, in her mind, a future together would include children. Huffine, who describes herself as an in-the-moment thinker, found it a challenge to look beyond the immediate. “I don’t even know what’s going on through the end of this year. She wanted me to look at the whole of our life,” Huffine says. Lynch-Sparks offered her time to think on it. “I thought, okay, she’ll come back to me tomorrow. It was three weeks,” Lynch-Sparks recalls. “She came back and she was like, ‘I thought about this a lot. Let’s do this.’ And that was the start.”

From there, the two underwent the grueling IVF process, each of them freezing their eggs. While Lynch-Sparks described the preparation for egg retrieval as “an experience in itself,” the two were heartened by the support they found. “We had a lot of friends to lean on who had gone down the same road—some LGBT and some heterosexual—who were all in the same boat with fertility, creating embryos, and IVF. We had people that we could ask questions to, which was really important,” Huffine says.

The couple decided to have fun with the process, each of them making presentations to state their case for their preferred sperm donors. “We keep saying it’s like Hinge,” Lynch-Sparks says, “but way more high-stakes.”

After the eggs were fertilized, they decided that the best course of action was for Lynch-Sparks to carry one of Huffine’s embryos, so that both of them would have an important connection to their baby. But there was another factor involved. The two, both now 40, froze their eggs at 37. “Where we are with age was also the defining factor. When you make embryos the number of what you have to implant goes down,” she adds. “We started Candice’s eggs because her egg count was a little bit lower than mine, just in case we wanted to go through another round of an egg retrieval—which we didn’t.”

For Huffine, the process proved enlightening—something she is trying to share with as many people as she can, especially as reproductive rights come under attack. “A lot of our girlfriends—whether they’re in a relationship or not, queer or straight—have been freezing their eggs for protective measures for themselves, because they don’t know if they want to have a child right at this moment and they would like the option,” she says. “In getting this information and seeing how everything works out with retrieval and freezing and thawing, and what you’re left to work with, I’ve been really vocal in sharing like, if you need to do another round, do it now, so there are no surprises.”