A woman desperately wants to have a child from her partner who passed away because of pneumonia.
Ellie Horne, 22, from Milton Keynes, Bucks was left devastated when her fiancé Myles died from Pneumonia four months ago after a long battle against Leukemia.
Though Myles had frozen some of his sperms, Ellie is now launching a legal battle to have the legal rights as he had not signed consent explicitly to say that she can use it following his passing. She said: “It should rightly be mine.”
Before Myles’ death last September, the couple who had been together for 3 years had already started having IVF treatment to try to have a baby of their own. Ellie is now motivated to continue that treatment so that she can have the child that she and Myles had dreamed of.
In an interview with Ellie, she said: “Before Myles started his treatment he was asked if we wanted some of his semen to be frozen and stored incased, he ever wanted to start a family.”
Ellie continued: “He said yes, of course.
Having children together was something we had always planned and dreamed of. So, there are nine vials in storage with the NHS, waiting to be used. I had started the initial consultations with an IVF clinic and the plan was for me to get pregnant as soon as possible”.
Tragically, Myles’ health declined rapidly last year after he suffered a series of infections and died last September 2021. Myles passing four months ago was still sudden and unexpected according to Ellie, who has taken his last name, despite the pandemic preventing their marriage.
Though the couple did not realize it at the time, crucially none of the doctors or officials mentioned Myle’s frozen semen before he died.
Ellie explained: “As the law stands, he needed to sign a consent form for me to use his sperm after he passed away. Nobody told us this. We had no idea. Had we known, he would most definitely have signed. We had talked so much about the baby we wanted to have.”
“If it was a boy, we planned to call him Mylo, after Myles. If it’s a girl we wanted to call her Nora, after my nan. We talked about how the child would be into Star Wars and geeky things, just like their dad. Death was something that was never anticipated,” she added.
As his fiancé did not give explicit consent, Ellie has no legal right to use the frozen sperm for IVF treatment, meaning she will have to fight an uphill legal battle that will cost her up to $80,o00.
She has the support of Myles’ family, but lawyers have given her only a 50/50 chance of winning her case and she has already spent all her funds in her fight against it. She has now turned to the public and has set up a Gofundme page to try and raise the funds for her court battle.
Ellie said: “I am now facing a very long and costly court case to win legality over Myles’ stored semen, something that should rightly be mine.”
“Not only have I lost the love of my life; the man with who I built a life, planned to marry and carry his children but I am on the brink of losing the chance to ever even have our children. We all feel it would be a little bit of Myles that we still have. The child would be loved and cherished,” she added.
Ellie said that she is desperately in need of funds now as she has already used all of the cash she and Myles had to set aside to build their future.
She said: “Thank you to everyone who has been sharing and donating. You will never know how much it means to us. To every person who knew us personally, you will know that this was our one wish.”
“These past few days I have been completely and solely occupied with gathering up every single piece of evidence to show how much I and Myles wanted children, and how we were already involved in the early stages of IVF,” she added.