After Amber Heard announced the birth of her twins on Mother’s Day amid openly acknowledged fertility troubles, many are speculating that the babies might be the newest addition to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s already large family due to an ongoing frozen embryo dispute.
As it happens, the Aquaman actress, who made headlines over the Johnny Depp defamation lawsuit, has welcomed a daughter and a son four years after having her first child through surrogacy, officially sharing the happy news alongside her excitement in a post on her Instagram account on May 11.
Notably, Heard was once in a relationship with the technology billionaire and SpaceX founder, during which the two had planned to have children together, and for which purpose they allegedly had their embryos frozen, according to the earlier reports by the Daily Mail.
According to those reports, a 2022 court case declaration by a friend of Amber’s sister reveals those plans, and that Heard had been fighting a legal battle with Musk “over embryos they had created together.” As she said at the time, Musk wanted to destroy them, and the actress tried to keep them.
The frozen embryos process
According to the Johns Hopkins Medicine website, the procedure of creating ‘frozen embryos’ (or cryopreserved embryos) involves removing eggs from the ovaries, fertilizing them to create the embryos, letting them grow for several days, and then freezing them, as a fertility preservation technique.
Frozen embryos can be stored for up to 30 years and, when thawed, used in IVF (in vitro fertilization) procedures to achieve pregnancy in what is called a frozen embryo transfer (FET). This technique has comparable success rates to fresh embryo transfer, some even showing higher success rates.
Now, this isn’t the first time that the Heard-Musk frozen embryos claim has surfaced, as some believe that Musk, whom Heard met on the set of Machete Kills (2013) where he had a cameo and dated on and off between 2016 and 2018, could also be the father of the actress’s four-year-old daughter Oonagh.