Source: BBC
The number of women using donated eggs has risen sharply in the past 10 years, latest figures show.
In 2006 1,912 women had IVF using a donor egg, compared with 3,924 in 2016, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) said.
It attributed the rise to a greater awareness of donation as an option, more donors, and more same sex couples, single and older women using them.
The number of women donating their eggs is also on the increase.
Source: Metro.co.uk
A grandmother enjoyed being pregnant so much that she decided to become a surrogate mum in her 50s. Sue Fisher is thought to be the oldest woman in the UK to become a surrogate for strangers.
After a divorce from her husband of 30 years and with her children grown up, Sue, now 55, decided she wanted to help another couple experience the joy of childbirth. Despite initially worrying that no one would pick her due to her age, she clicked with a gay couple desperate to have kids.
Source: BioNews
The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has said that it will halt funding for the Donor Conceived Register from the end of May.
The register has facilitated voluntary contact between people in the UK conceived through donated sperm or egg before 1991 and their donors, allowing them to exchange information or get in touch if they wish.
‘We have carefully considered the options and on reflection, we now feel there are alternative ways in which support groups can form, removing the requirement for a central body to coordinate the group,’ the HFEA wrote in a letter to the National Gamete Donation Trust (NGDT), the charity that runs the register.
Source: BioNews
Fertility treatment in the UK is more successful and safer than ever before, according to a report from the HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority).
IVF is now 85 percent more likely to succeed than when records first began in 1991, said the regulator. Over 20,000 babies were born in 2016 as a result of more than 68,000 IVF treatments, an increase of four percent from 2015. The HFEA’s new report covers fertility treatment trends and success rates for the 2014-2016 period.
Source: Mirror
Online pals Elouise King and Jenny Robinson were nervous about their first face-to-face meeting – yet it would seal the mother of all friendships.
The pair had exchanged messages on a surrogacy forum but didn’t know if they would click in person.
That first meeting was in a pub. Fitting really, for just 18 months later they would be wetting the baby’s head not once, but twice, after Jen gave birth to Elouise and hubby Paul’s TWINS .
Source The Sunday Times
Raised by three lesbian parents, Jordan Waller had just a brief description of his biological father. Despite being bullied as a child, the actor says his upbringing has been a blessing
I know about my dad is that he is a 6ft-tall doctor with brown hair and green eyes. My parents chose him from a list at a sperm bank in Bristol, and from the moment I was old enough to understand, they were open with me that I was born via artificial sperm donor insemination to my biological mum, Miranda.
The donor was chosen to match mum’s partner, Dawn, in terms of her physical characteristics, so on paper I should have been tall and dark, but I turned out to be blond and blue-eyed. My mum likes to joke that they must have mixed up the sperm
Source: The Sunday Times
Surrogacy support groups and family lawyers have criticised the government’s planned new laws on surrogacy, which they say will force 80 couples a year to go abroad to have children.
The government’s deadline for submissions on the planned Assisted Human Reproduction Bill, which will set up a new regulatory regime for surrogacy and other forms of assisted reproduction, closed last week.
Source: Daily Mail
Randi Fishman was 28, newly married, and ready to start a family when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2011.
The crushing news was made all the more painful when her Maryland doctors said that, even if she overcame the disease, carrying children could be a risk that could cost Randi her life.
She immediately got her eggs frozen, and along with husband Zach, then also 28, started the lengthy and expensive process to find a surrogate to carry their embryos fertilized by IVF.
Source: Daily Mail
Lady Victoria Hervey is planning to have a child with a male friend after admitting ‘time is ticking’.
The 41-year-old former It girl, who recently had six of her eggs frozen at a clinic in the US, revealed during an appearance on ITV’s Lorraine that a close friend had offered to donate his sperm.
‘Right now I have a friend who is willing to be the father. I am really considering I am going to do that,’ she explained on the daytime TV show.
The socialite has not hidden her desire to become a mother, opening up in a Mail on Sunday column that she hoped having a baby would ‘fill what has become rather a hole in my life’.
Source: Shropshire Star
For more than a quarter of a century, it has been helping thousands of couples realise their dreams of becoming parents.
The Shropshire and Mid Wales Fertility Centre is one of the top IVF clinics in the UK.
But it has outgrown its current home at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and is now set to move to a new facility on the outskirts of Shrewsbury.
From this summer, the centre will be operating from Severn Fields Health Village in Sundorne.
The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, which runs the facility, says it will mean better facilities for patients and the multi-professional fertility team.
Read more
Source ITV
A woman from Rotherham who has been a surrogate mother twice – is calling for urgent changes to what they believe to be outdated surrogacy law.
When Kate became pregnant she always intended to give the child to its parents, Tracy and Pete from Portsmouth.
But, under UK law she could have changed her mind at any point and kept the baby as her own, because she gave birth to the child
Source: Daily Mail
A woman who feared she would never carry a child after going through the menopause aged 11 has revealed she is three months pregnant.
Amanda Lewis, now 30, is expecting her first child after having IVF treatment using a donor egg and her partner’s sperm.
Source: BioNews
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has granted permission for doctors to create the UK’s first ‘three-person’ children by mitochondrial donation. Doctors at Newcastle Fertility Centre successfully applied to treat two women and are now allowed to create embryos by combining fertilised eggs created through IVF with mitochondria from a female donor. The resulting embryos will be implanted in the two women.
Source: Metro UK
If you were looking for a financial escape hatch to pay off student loans or mortgages by donating something that your body discards monthly, you should know something first. Men fake orgasms too – here’s why and how You have better chances of making money by finding one of Cadbury’s elusive white chocolate Creme Egg than you do donating your own.
Read more
Source: Sputnik News
British scientists have received the green light to create the country’s first so-called three parent babies.
The use of mitochondrial therapy been approved by the The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority three years after the therapy was legalized in the country.
Source: Daily Mail
A couple who went through seven failed rounds of IVF treatment before finally having twins through a surrogate have said they will ‘never know how to repay’ her kindness. Elouise King and her husband Paul, from Solihull in the West Midlands, thought their dream of becoming parents was over after a miscarriage in 2013 led to complications. Mrs King had undergone a surgical procedure to remove the foetus, but afterwards she was struck down with a rare condition known as Asherman syndrome which causes scarring of the cervix and uterus.
Source: The Sun
Medics plan to use the method on two women who risk passing on genetic diseases to their kids. The unnamed pair have a mutation that leads to myoclonic epilepsy. The ailment hits one in 100,000 people, causing spasms that see lost muscle control, weakness, deafness, dementia and often death. In the treatment, once the mum’s egg is fertilised, the cell nucleus with the bulk of her and the dad’s genetic material is removed. The mutation is left behind, as it only occurs in the mitochondrial DNA which is not present in the nucleus.
Source: The Guardian
I had children in my teens and became a grandmother two decades ago. I’ve always thought how lucky I was to get pregnant so easily, and how heartbreaking it is for people who can’t. I liked the idea of being a surrogate, but my husband wasn’t keen. By 2012, we had divorced, and I’d taken care of my parents and older brother, who sadly passed away. I’d turned 50 and thought, if I’m going to do this, it needs to be now.
Source: HuffPost UK
A current family law case in the US has caught the media’s attention. It’s one which is difficult, emotional and demands a solution. A gay married couple is suing the US government after the birth of their twins. One twin was conceived with the sperm of one father (a US citizen) and the other was conceived with the sperm of the other father (an Israeli citizen). The birth of the twins took place in Canada (where the fathers were married), and both fathers were listed on each both certificate.
Source: BBC
A man who lost his wife to cancer said he is ending their bid to have a child through a surrogate.
Emmy Coates died in June, aged 31, just 18 months after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
She and husband Jake, 32, had planned to use embryos, frozen after her cancer spread, in order to have a baby.
