She Said No. Her Family Said God Disagrees: Mayci’s Family Pressures Her Into Another Pregnancy on ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’
by Chrissy Stockton · Thought CatalogUpdated 2 minutes ago, September 12, 2026
Central to Mormon belief is the concept of premortal existence: every person, the teaching goes, lived before this life as a spirit child of Heavenly Father, without a physical body, waiting to be born on earth.
Church leaders have long taught it’s the duty of married couples to help make that happen — pairing it with hardline pronatalist teaching. One widely quoted line from a past church president called it “an act of extreme selfishness for a married couple to refuse to have children when they are able to do so.” Brigham Young put it more bluntly in the 1850s: it was “the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can.” For decades afterward, top church leaders branded birth control a “pernicious doctrine” and limiting family size sinful.
That’s the doctrinal backdrop behind Mayci Neeley’s husband and family pressuring her to get pregnant against her wishes on season 5 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”
In the second episode, “The Book of Dead Roses,” Mayci gets hit from three directions at once — her mother, her sister, and her husband Jacob — all pushing her toward another round of IVF and a fourth child. This isn’t abstract for her. She’s already been open about the physical toll of pregnancy and postpartum recovery, admitting she filmed season 4 while “still bleeding and wearing pads” weeks after giving birth to daughter Charli. Because Charli was conceived via IVF, another baby means another two-month gauntlet of hormone injections and fertility treatment.
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Mayci says no. Plainly. She just had a baby. She’s not doing that again right now.
Here’s the line that turns this from a garden-variety in-law squabble into something much darker: her family’s argument, as reported, is that the couple’s one remaining frozen embryo already has a soul — and that soul is sitting in a freezer, waiting. It’s not a request anymore. It’s a moral emergency, dressed up in theology, aimed at a woman’s body.
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