Left to right: Solo mums Emma, Clare and Sarah with their children Xander, Albert and Astrid and Oliver (Picture: Natasha Pszenicki)
At 56, Sarah Glover lay in a hospital bed, holding her newborn baby Oliver in her arms. It was March 13, 2023, and she had finally fulfilled her dream of becoming a mother, although she did it alone.
She’s not the only one either. The number of single women having IVF or donor insemination treatment has tripled in just a decade, according to the UK’s fertility regulator – increasing from 1,400 to 4,800 women each year.
Recalling the day her son was born, Sarah tells Metro, ‘Giving birth was unbelievable. You can’t believe that little thing was inside you and the next minute you’ve got him – that picture imprints on your mind forever.’
She had become a solo mother by choice after her dating life had ‘passed her by’ and she hadn’t found a partner she wanted to start a family with.
‘I went away a lot travelling, on Buddhist retreats, mountaineering – I had a very full life. I enjoyed it but I kept feeling that it wasn’t enough,’ Sarah says.
‘I was getting older and hadn’t met anyone I wanted to pursue parenthood with. But it was this burning inside me that just didn’t go away.
‘Since my early forties I’d been trying to meet someone on a dating site but when you start telling them you want a child it gets harder and harder.’
Sarah believes that you need a strong support network to become a solo mum, but it’s the best thing she’s ever done (Picture: Natasha Pszenicki)
Becoming a solo mum
Sarah first looked into having a child alone at 41 but felt it was ‘too scary’. However, when she reached 47 she decided to take the leap.
She spent more than £30,000 in total for her IVF treatment, at first funding it with her credit cards before using her inheritance from her late father to fund further treatment.
The mum-of-one didn’t get pregnant on her first attempt though. She had five IUI sessions, where the sperm is injected directly into the uterus, but after these failed she then had a round of IVF with her own eggs.
‘By that time it had been a year-and-a-half and I realised it wasn’t going to work. It was too much emotionally, so I left and went on holiday to Slovenia,’ she explains.
However, her desire to have a child didn’t go away and at 49, Sarah decided to ‘give it one last shot’.
Choosing a sperm donor
At 51, she found herself in a fertility clinic in Cyprus where she selected an egg donor with similar genetics to herself, while the sperm she used came from a Danish sperm bank.
Sarah’s sperm donor was a Czech man in his mid 20s – and it was the donor’s ‘powerful’ letter, detailing why he’d donated, that helped her know she’d made the right choice.
Sarah and her son Oliver who was born …read more
Source:: Metro
