Shana Ilagan was told by doctors it was too late for her to conceive again, but the Nashville mother is now holding her second child, a nine-month-old daughter named Evelyn Elizabeth, after a journey through embryo adoption that included multiple miscarriages before a successful implantation. Ilagan calls her daughter, born in October 2025, her miracle.
Ilagan had her first child shortly after getting married, but conceiving again years later proved far harder, according to WSMV. She married during the pandemic at age 42 in Nashville and hoped to add a daughter to her family, but doctors told her it was too late to conceive again. That is when she turned to Nashville Fertility and embryo adoption, a path that let her sidestep the fertility limits tied to her own age.
The station reports that Ilagan suffered multiple miscarriages along the way, including another pregnancy loss after her first embryo adoption attempt. A doctor at Nashville Fertility eventually referred her to a specialist, who determined why her pregnancy losses were occurring. She was then treated with antibiotics, steroids and baby aspirin — a regimen consistent with standard protocols the American Society for Reproductive Medicine says are commonly used to treat recurrent pregnancy loss linked to chronic endometritis or uterine immune factors, helping improve the odds of successful implantation.
A Second Implantation, and a Different Outcome
With the underlying cause addressed, Ilagan underwent a second embryo implantation. This time, it was successful. She gave birth to Evelyn Elizabeth in October 2025 in Nashville and held her daughter for the first time in the operating room, per the same account from the station.
The odds Ilagan faced were steep. According to the article, natural childbirth after age 40 carries a probability of about 5 percent, underscoring just how statistically improbable her outcome would have been without the embryo adoption route she pursued. National data backs up how rare it is for women in Ilagan's age range to give birth at all: provisional 2024 figures from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics show that while birth rates for women ages 40 to 44 grew by 2%, birth rates for women 45 to 49 remained flat and low nationwide.
Why Embryo Adoption Changes the Math
Embryo adoption offers a workaround to age-related fertility decline because donated embryos typically come from younger couples' earlier IVF cycles, bypassing the egg-quality issues that make natural conception so difficult for older women. CDC surveillance data covering 2016 through 2019 found that frozen donated embryo transfers yielded a 53.4% pregnancy rate and a 43.5% live birth rate per transfer, according to a study published via CDC Stacks.
Tennessee has become something of a national hub for this approach. Knoxville is home to the National Embryo Donation Center, founded in 2003, which operates as one of the country's largest non-profit embryo adoption organizations and reports a cumulative live birth rate of approximately 50% per transfer, per Adoption Assistance, Inc. Nashville Fertility Center, the clinic where Ilagan's journey began, was founded in 1991 and was recognized by Newsweek as the top-ranked fertility clinic in Tennessee in 2024, ranking among the top 20 fertility centers nationwide.
The financial picture also differs from conventional fertility treatment. Embryo adoption and transfer procedures typically cost between $4,000 and $15,000, compared to $10,000 to $30,000 or more for traditional or donor-egg IVF, according to Progyny — a gap driven partly by laws prohibiting embryo donors from receiving financial compensation for donated embryos.
Legal Ground Rules for Embryos in Tennessee
Tennessee treats the legal side of embryo adoption differently than most people expect. Frozen embryos are classified as personal property prior to implantation under state legal standards, meaning the process is executed through a relinquishment contract and transfer of custodianship rather than a traditional post-birth adoption process, according to Rejoice Fertility. Tennessee's own birth trends have been on the rise even as national fertility rates decline broadly — provisional 2024 data showed 83,742 live births statewide, marking the fourth consecutive annual increase, per the Tennessee State Data Center.
Fertility struggles like Ilagan's have also become more visible nationally in recent years. A Pew Research Center survey cited in 2024 found that 42% of U.S. adults have used fertility treatments or know someone who has, up from 33% in 2018 — a jump that reflects how normalized assisted reproduction has become across the country.
A Message for Other Women
Ilagan wants her story to encourage other women facing similar struggles. She said there is more hope available than people think, and that people have more ways to have a baby than the traditional method. She encourages women not to give up.
The Nashville region's fertility landscape has also drawn regulatory scrutiny in the recent past. In April 2024, the Tennessee Attorney General filed a Consumer Protection Act lawsuit against a Nashville fertility specialist after the abrupt closure of his clinic left patients without access to their medical records or frozen biological materials, as Hoodline previously reported. For now, Ilagan says she loved her daughter and would take care of her, describing Evelyn Elizabeth simply as her second child and her miracle.
