You start out thinking you re going to be the chosen ones, says Carole, who lives in south west London, and you want proof your body can work normally like everybody else s. But IVF is an inexact science when it comes to explaining why some couples get lucky and others fail time after time. Yet that doesn t stop couples paying up to 2,000 for a course of IVF, during which they hope at least one of the three fertilised embryos usually implanted into the woman s uterus will develop into the longed-for child. During the six weeks it takes for a single cycle of IVF to be completed, the woman will be injected with hormones until her legs are sore from needle pricks, before she then endures an agonising two-week wait until it s time for a pregnancy kit test to tell whether she s a mother or not. You can t help it because you so want it to be true.
Failure feels devastating because both partners think they ve let the other down.
The husband thinks it hasn t worked because his sperm wasn t good enough and the wife feels she s to blame for not getting pregnant. Twenty years previously, Carole had undergone chemotherapy for lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes, which was when her ovaries were, without her knowledge, irreparably damaged. Since the first test tube baby Louise Brown was born 22 years ago, fertility has come to be regarded as a human right. It used to be seen as a tragedy couples had to accept and live with. Now we seem to think science can give us designer babies on tap.