Shared motherhood option enabled us to ‘make our baby together’
30 Jul 2024
Gemma had been told that her endometriosis was so severe that she might struggle to get pregnant, and her partner Vic had a scare when her first smear test revealed pre-cancerous cells that needed to be removed. So, they researched many alternative ways for having children together, including adoption and fertility treatment (IUI and IVF) and found shared motherhood IVF.
Fell in love with the idea of shared motherhood IVF
Gemma says: “We knew that we wanted to share the experience of having a child, so when we saw the option of shared motherhood IVF we instantly fell in love with the idea. Then we found that Bourn Hall offered this and thought it was perfect for us.
“Vic really wanted to be a mum but didn’t want to carry the pregnancy, and I was very keen on using Vic’s eggs.
“It all happened very quickly. In May we decided to go ahead and by July Vic was having her eggs collected. They did all the tests, got us both on medication to synchronise our cycles and did the embryo transfer a few days after the collected eggs were fertilised.”
Vic says: “I was taking injections for about two weeks for the follicles holding the eggs to grow. I was going up to the Norwich clinic every few days to have an internal scan to check them. Then two days before they were to be collected, I had a trigger injection.
“At the same time, Gemma’s injections were to get the lining of her womb thick enough to carry the pregnancy. It was all a bit crazy, really – and a blur now.”
Shared motherhood IVF is one of the options Bourn hall provides for same-sex couples; see what other options Bourn Hall provides.
Emotional looking for a donor
Initially, admits Vic, choosing their donor was more challenging than they had thought.
“Bourn Hall gave us a choice of four sperm donors, and we didn’t expect to feel the way we did when looking through their profiles,” she says. “It is quite an emotional thing choosing a donor. Obviously being a same-sex couple, we always knew we would need a third party, a sperm donor, but we still had to get our heads around it a little bit and then it was okay.
“We wanted to go with somebody who had features and characteristics more like Gemma’s, but it didn’t work out that way. I have got very strong genes – the baby looks like me!
“I had 13 eggs retrieved on egg collection day, which were fertilised using the donor sperm and left to reach blastocyst stage, after which we ended up with five embryos.”
Four embryos in the freezer as a back up
“I had 13 eggs retrieved on egg collection day, which were fertilised using the donor sperm and left to reach blastocyst stage, after which we ended up with five embryos.” Four of the embryos were frozen and the top graded one was transferred to Gemma.
“We felt quite lucky that if this attempt didn’t work, we still had four good quality embryos in the freezer,” says Gemma.
“I was a little bit nervous at the embryo transfer but I was mostly excited. I had previously undergone procedures and investigations with my endometriosis and already knew that, in comparison, embryo transfer wasn’t as bad, so I tried to stay nice and calm.
“I think the most nerve-wracking part was the ten-day wait to find out if we were pregnant. I had been saying to Vic from day six ‘shall we do a test?’ and she kept saying ‘no’, but on day nine I said ‘I’ve just got a feeling; I will just do one test’.”
With some trepidation Gemma did the pregnancy test.
“I think our whole street probably heard our reaction,” laughs Vic.
“We were over the moon when we saw that the test was positive,” says Gemma. “We couldn’t believe it had worked first time.”
We made him together
In March 2024, the couple welcomed their son Arthur, born at the James Pagett Hospital. He was the first grandchild for Vic’s parents and second for Gemma’s mum and stepdad.
“He is very special,” says Gemma. “I can’t really explain it. We look at him and think ‘wow we made him together’. I think it is nice as well doing it the way we did with the shared motherhood IVF.
“Vic has a very strong bond with him as he is biologically a part of her, and because I ‘grew’ him and gave birth to him he is a part of me as well. It is just very surreal, almost too good to be true.
“He is such an easy, cuddly baby, he doesn’t like to be put down much and that is fine because we are cuddly mums!”
Shared motherhood IVF means everything to us
“Being able to have shared motherhood IVF means everything to us, it is phenomenal and means the world,” says Gemma. “And Bourn Hall were amazing, they went above and beyond to make our dreams come true. Everyone was lovely, treated us with the utmost care and respect, and the clinic was so nice we didn’t get ‘white coat syndrome’ when we went in there.
“We had to fund our own treatment, we were not entitled to support on the NHS, but for us having a family of our own is priceless. I would pay it five times over again just to have Arthur – he is worth every penny and more.”
More information
Read more from same-sex couples who received treatment at Bourn Hall on our blog.
Shared motherhood IVF is one of the options Bourn Hall provides for same-sex couples; see what other options Bourn Hall provides.
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