Erin Holland and Ben Cutting welcomed their baby on August 18 after five years of fertility struggles and IVF. Holland said the long road included 20 rounds of IVF, and the birth post on Instagram framed the moment as the end of a stretch defined by repeated loss and uncertainty.
“All of the sudden, it all makes sense. It was always you,” Holland wrote in the caption on the couple’s announcement post. That line landed after five egg collections, seven transfers, four miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy, a sequence that turned a private family milestone into a rare public record of how drawn-out fertility treatment can become.
Erin Holland and Ben Cutting
Earlier in 2026, the couple fell pregnant after five years of fertility struggles and IVF, then spent the rest of the pregnancy under the shadow of what Holland described as a hard-won expectation of loss. In May, she discussed the journey on Something To Talk About with Sarrah Le Marquand, and the details she gave there explain why this birth matters beyond the couple itself: it shows how success in IVF can arrive only after a long run of failures, not a single neat cycle.
“I think the hard part about infertility and pregnancy loss is that beautiful naivety of just seeing a double line on a pregnancy test is robbed from you because the first time you do it, it’s elation, it’s so exciting,” Holland said on the podcast in May. “Then the second time you do it, you’re cautiously excited. By the third and the fourth time, you think it’s catfishing you.”
Earlier in August
Earlier in August, Holland told that she had started to feel some relief, but not before months of looking over her shoulder. “I feel like I’ve been waiting for it to go wrong the whole time, which is really sad,” she said. “I’m starting to get excited now, which is nice, now that we’re sort of so far into it and everything’s going OK.”
She also said, “I think the thing that I’ve noticed the most just through sharing my own story with the wider community is, it’s so common that people struggle and struggle in silence,” which is the useful takeaway from this birth announcement: the scale of the struggle was not ordinary private anxiety, but a years-long pattern of 20 rounds of IVF, five egg collections, seven transfers, four miscarriages and one ectopic pregnancy.
On August 21
On August 21, the story was updated with the birth news, and the missing details stayed missing: the baby’s name and sex were not included. For readers following Holland’s account for their own fertility journeys, the practical point is the most personal one — the pregnancy she had braced herself to lose ended with a baby in her arms, after a public record of treatment, loss and fear that now has a different ending.
