‘Raising’ concern
If she uses our embryo, kid will have no dad: ex’s suit
The pain of growing up fatherless is behind a Brooklyn man’s fight to stop his ex from using their frozen embryos to get pregnant, according to new court papers.
In an increasingly bitter legal battle, Kevin Heldt went to court last month to stop Ilissa Watnik from getting pregnant with fertilized eggs the estranged couple had been storing at a Manhattan fertility clinic.
Watnik, 42, claimed she and Heldt had agreed she could have the genetic material if they broke up and accused Heldt of using legal maneuvers as a “weapon” to run out her biological clock.
“I respect Ilissa’s desire to become a parent,” Heldt states in a legal response filed this week in Manhattan Supreme Court. “Ilissa should respect my desire not to want to become a parent with her.”
Heldt, a tech salesman, says the issue goes beyond lawyer Watnik’s comfortable financial capability to provide for a child.
“No agreement can cure my sense of moral responsibility that would come from knowing that there is [a] child in the world that is genetically mine,” he says.
Heldt, who was raised by a single mother, says he would feel a moral obligation for the child.
“Having grown up primarily with my mother, I understand the void a child feels when everyone’s father is around, and your father is not,” he says in court papers. “I would have difficulty going to bed at night without knowing whether my child has a roof over his head, clothes on his back or food in his stomach . . . Her ability to support a child independent of me would not fill the void in my heart if I knew I had turned my back on a child that shared my genetics.”
Watnik has slammed Heldt for opposing her efforts to use their embryos, insisting he would have no financial obligation to their child because she doesn’t need his money.
“I am 42 years old. I want to be a mother. I want to raise a child,” she said in court papers earlier this month.
The couple dated from 2014 to 2016 and lived together in Watnik’s Midtown pad. An initial attempt at in vitro fertilization failed, and they later split, leaving four embryos behind.
But Watnik can become a mom without forcing Heldt into becoming a biological parent, he argues.
“For Ilissa and all of us, neither age, or infertility problems of any type, prohibit us from the joy of having a child,” he claims. “The idea that I am running out Ilissa’s ‘biological clock’ is outdated.”
Watnik could use donor eggs and sperm or a surrogate mother to carry a child or she could simply adopt, Heldt notes.
“Adopted children placed in wonderful homes have gone on to change the world — Steve Jobs is the prime example. Thus, today, perhaps for less than the cost of this litigation, a person can become a parent without regard to ‘biological clocks,’ ” he says.
Heldt wants to be a dad one day, but not under these circumstances, his lawyer, Juan Luciano, said.
Heldt insists the embryos are joint property and is asking a judge to weigh in.
The couple’s embryo agreement can’t be undone after the fact, says Watnik’s attorney Phil Chronakis, who said the thrice-married Heldt can “change wives annually if he likes. The law does not permit him to change his mind about Ms. Watnik using her own eggs to get pregnant.”
Adoption is “wonderful, but irrelevant” to this case, Chronakis continued, adding that Heldt’s “belated pangs of morality are a joke . . . Nobody cares about his childhood or fears . . . His real fear should be children someday learning how their sperm donor of a father fought tooth and nail to prevent their birth.”