More Than a Decade After Freezing Her Eggs and 10 Rounds of IVF, Singer Details Journey to Welcoming Baby at 47

The disease, called Wilson disease, is a rare, inherited disorder where the body doesn’t get rid of extra copper, causing it to build up in various organs, according to the Mayo Clinic. Because both Mintz and her partner were carriers for the disease, it meant that 25% of their children would have it.

Mintz’s doctor told her and Stephen that they could not thaw and fertilize their eggs without first creating a probe, which is a special test created for their embryos from their own familial DNA. They had to get DNA samples from both their sets of parents and send them to a separate company, which would then take six months to make the test. Once they had the test, they’d then be able to thaw Mintz’s eggs.

“Unfortunately, that was a really huge setback looking back, because what happened was we then could not thaw my eggs until I was 44, which got us really late in the game,” Mintz says, “which would not have been a problem if what happened next didn’t happen.”

Once they heard that their test was ready, Mintz and her partner wanted to start the process as fast as possible. They went the very next day to thaw the eggs and fertilize them, not expecting to hear back that same day. But then they got a call.

“We came home and I got a call really quickly, as soon as we got home, from the lab saying that there was an error and none of my eggs survived the thaw,” she remembers, calling it “the most horrible thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Luckily, Mintz had pushed back on her doctor’s suggestion to unfreeze all her eggs at once — instead of thawing all 28, they had only thawed half of them. “And thank God because they ruined all of them on the first try,” she says.

When the doctors thawed the second half of her eggs, Mintz wasn’t sure it was going to work. But her embryologist personally called her and let her know he was sure he knew what went wrong and had an idea of what to do differently. After they finally thawed her eggs successfully, Mintz was left with just one egg.

That one egg, thankfully, did not have Wilson disease. But a new problem arose — implanting an egg via IVF can be very difficult. And Mintz only had one shot to get it right.

Mintz’s goal was to carry her own baby. But unfortunately when her doctor examined her uterus, he found a polyp that had to be removed. She scheduled surgery and underwent anesthesia, only to wake up to the news that the doctor’s surgical scissors had failed and there wasn’t another pair in their operating room — they weren’t able to remove the polyp.

He also let Mintz know that while he was looking at her uterus during surgery, he noticed that she had an incompetent cervix, which, according to the Mayo Clinic, denotes a cervix with weak cervical tissue that can make it hard for women to carry to full term. Since Mintz also had a blood clotting disorder, her doctor told her that he couldn’t recommend her carrying her own children.

“I felt like if you were reading [this], you’d be like, ‘This girl has to be making this up,'” Mintz says.

After getting four second opinions, Mintz had to face the tough reality – she couldn’t carry her own baby and she would have to get a surrogate.

“At this point, essentially, what I decided to do was I wanted to try to make another embryo if I could, because God forbid this one didn’t work,” she says. “We were told every opinion that we got, I was told that I had a 1% chance of making another embryo at [44]. But I just felt like if the one embryo failed and I didn’t try to make another, and I looked back on it, even for me trying with the 1%, I felt like I had to do it.”

From age 44 to 46, Mintz did nine more egg retrievals all over the country, while also trying to find a surrogate to place her one embryo. “It was basically psychological torture,” Mintz recalls. She did 3 egg retrievals in Colorado, one in New York and five in California. She also did some experimental procedures, including one where they inject PRP into your ovaries.

“So for those two years, from age 44 to 46, I was under anesthesia 13 times,” she says. “While also trying to find a surrogate to help us carry this one embryo and then constantly having it fall through for medical reasons.”

Although she was able to retrieve over 100 eggs, Mintz explained that they all had genetic abnormalities or wouldn’t make viable embryos. For all nine of those egg retrievals, she didn’t make a single normal embryo.

And then finally, something good happened. “When I was 46, we matched with our current surrogate, who is amazing,” Mintz says. “I call her a unicorn.”

At the beginning of 2024, Mintz and her partner were matched with their surrogate. She knew she was going on a two-week tour in late 2024 with her good friend, the musician Moby, and wanted to make sure she planned around that event. If all went according to plan, the surrogate would only be five or six months pregnant.

But the embryo transfer kept getting delayed. The surrogate, knowing that this was Mintz’s one and only shot, wanted to make sure that her body was in perfect health before the embryo was transferred. She first delayed in March of 2024, and then again every month through June.

Eventually, the stars aligned and Mintz’s doctor called to say that the embryo was going to be put in on September 6, 2024. Once the embryo went in, it took 10 days for there to be a positive pregnancy test. And unfortunately, ten days from September 6 was when Mintz was going to be on tour — in Europe.

“I knew that 10 days later was going to be my second day on tour in Europe, and I was really scared,” Mintz admitted, sharing that she wasn’t sure she wanted to go anymore. “If I find out that I’ve been through all of this for all these years, and then I get the call that, ‘We’re so sorry. There’s no positive pregnancy. You can’t have a biological child.’ I felt like I don’t know if I can psychologically handle that information in that setting.”

Ultimately, Mintz decided to go on tour. She felt like if the transfer failed, she was going to be devastated no matter where she was, and she didn’t want to miss out on a life event she’d been looking forward to.

“It was actually midnight when the doctor called and we were in rehearsals,” Mintz says. “We were in this huge empty stadium rehearsing, and I saw that it was my doctor calling and I answered, and I had to run because the music was so loud.”

When the doctor said that her surrogate was pregnant, Mintz was overcome with emotion. “I have this amazing picture of when I ran back into the rehearsal stage and I had thrown my arms up in victory because the music was really loud so nobody could hear me,” she remembers. “I basically just thew my arms up in the air and then Moby threw his arms up in the air because I think that he knew what it meant.”

“I felt like every single thing went wrong except for ultimately the one thing that had to go right,” Mintz says. “And I just can’t believe how in the end, I really feel like I’m the luckiest person alive that it worked, because I feel like there’s so many people that are still trying to get that one embryo, that are still trying to get that transfer to work. And I feel like it’s such a miracle.”

Ophelia Laurette was born on May 18 in Oregon, surrounded by her two parents. Mintz got to cut the umbilical cord – a decision she wasn’t sure she wanted to do.

“I decided if I can’t have the experience of giving birth to my own baby, because obviously if you’re giving birth to your child, you can’t cut the umbilical cord, so maybe I should just take advantage of this really unique once-in-a-lifetime experience of doing that,” she says of her choice.

“It is very surreal seeing someone else give birth to your child, but it’s also the ultimate gift that I honestly cannot even put into words,” Mintz continues. “And seeing it made it even more mind-blowing.”

Now, Mintz is hoping to pay it forward by creating a new grant called the Midsummer Dream Grant in partnership with BabyQuest. The grant aims to help families in need of IVF, surrogacy and/or rare genetic disease screening so that they can embark on their own journey to parenthood. Applications opened on June 1 and the recipients will be announced in early fall.

As she’s settling into her new life as a mom, Mintz says that she’s so glad she thought to freeze her eggs back when she was 33.

“One thing that I would tell myself is that I’m really proud of myself for having the forethought to freeze my eggs when I was 33, because even though I think that parts of my story are really scary, and the part of my eggs getting ruined in the thaw, I know is really terrifying to people,” Mintz explains.

“But ultimately, Ophelia came from my one 33-year-old egg that survived, and if I hadn’t done that, I would not have been able to have her.”