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It was Covid that gave Amy, 45, the final push to have fertility treatment on her own. “I had been thinking about it for a while, and then with Covid, I thought: ‘I’m never gonna meet anybody.’ And I didn’t really want to be that woman who’s like: ‘Hey, we’ve been on one internet date. Let’s have a baby!”
Amy struck lucky with her first embryo transfer and is now the mother of a three-year-old. “I feel very blessed,” she said.
Going through IVF as a single woman wasimpler than she feared. “I think doing it without a partner is probably a bit easier. I didn’t have anybody to take the hormones out on or anything like that. I just got on with injecting myself in the stomach,” she said.
“In contrast, I’d say probably half the people I know who have gone through IVF have ended up splitting up afterwards.”
When her daughter was a baby, Amy was occasionally troubled by the possible ramifications of her choice. “I worried whether she’d mind not having a dad,” she said. “But now I think it’s good not to have rushed into a relationship that might not have worked simply for that reason.”
Amy even felt liberated by her ability to tell people she’d done it on her own. “People would ask: ‘Did he leave you – did you leave him?’ and it felt good to be able to say: ‘Nope, I did it on my own!’”
According to data released by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority on Tuesday, the number of single UK women having fertility treatment has more than trebled in the past decade.
There were 4,800 women without a partner who had in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or donor insemination (DI) treatment in 2022, a 243% increase from the 1,400 single women who had fertility treatment in 2012. The number of women in a same-sex couple having fertility treatment has also more than doubled.
Being gay made the choice easier for Emma Brockes, who was in a “tenuous relationship” with her partner, who agreed that they shouldn’t have children together. Now 48 and the mother of twin nine-year-old girls, Brockes is “thrilled” that more single women are having fertility treatment.
“I’m glad that it’s becoming more common because I think the biggest prohibition is shame and this sense that it is second-best, and I think not doing something for that reason is almost always the wrong choice,” she said.
Brockes, a Guardian columnist based in New York, said making the decision to undergo fertility treatment is easier for lesbians. “We’re always going to have to have help anyway, so it’s not like it feels unnatural,” she said – although going through the process alone, she conceded, isn’t for everyone.
“I was fine about it,” she said. “I had lots of people who would have come with me to all my appointments but I wanted to do it on my own. It just depends on where you are on the sentimentality spectrum, and it helped me to do it by myself.”
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Jennifer, 45, has given herself one more year before taking the plunge.
“I want a husband and a family but I left it a bit late because of work and moving countries,” she said. “Dating at this age is almost impossible and I had breast cancer last year, which focused my mind on what I really wanted.”
Jennifer got a master’s degree two years ago so she could change her career to something more highly paid. “If I’m going to do this on my own, I need to be able to afford not just the treatment but being a single mother,” she said.
The decision, she said, is not exactly empowering. “I’d say it’s liberating,” she said. “I’m grateful for the societal and scientific achievements that give single women the freedom to have children through IVF, but it’s not empowering because I’d much prefer to be doing this with the love of my life.”
For Helen, a 40-year-old civil servant in Scotland, doing IVF on her own has been distressing. “For the last year, I have been doing IVF to try to have a baby by myself after experiencing domestic abuse,” she said. “I wanted a second child and decided I’d rather do that alone than rush into a relationship or take the risk of coparenting with someone.
“Sadly, the treatment has failed and I’m now unable to pay for further treatment or continue going through the emotional strain of fertility treatment alone. I wish I’d understood when I was 30 that my reproductive choices would have been much better if I’d frozen my eggs at that age. More women should be aware that the ability to have IVF on your own doesn’t mean it’s going to work.”
