Emma’s fertility story began, counterintuitively, with a breakup. “At 32, I’d reached the age where most of my friends were coupled up and many were having babies. I began to worry that my biological clock was ticking forward faster than my love life could catch up. So I paid for a fertility MOT for future-proofing.” The results weren’t good; Emma’s egg count was low (below the 10th percentile) and time was suddenly of the essence if she wanted to have children of her own.
Egg freezing was the obvious option. But Emma’s low egg count would have required her to go through multiple rounds to garner enough eggs to give her the best possible chance of having a baby: an expensive and exhausting process. “I also considered how I might feel if I waited years to go back to use my frozen eggs, either with a partner or donor, and found none were viable,” she says. The best option was to pursue IVF with donor sperm to “bank embryos for the future”.
