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.’
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.
The letter read in part: ‘Dear child, how lucky you are to have wonderful parents who wanted to have a beautiful little person they could devote their lives to… they couldn’t have you in the “normal way”… I’m here to help people create a life and that is the most beautiful thing in the world… I wish you the best of luck in your happy life.’
While the donor was anonymous, Oliver will be able to reach out to him when he turns 18, if he wishes to do so.
Not everyone understands
Now 58, solo mum Sarah does confess that she has received more than her fair share of judgement and negativity throughout her journey – yet, in spite of that, for her it’s still been an ‘unbelievable’ and amazing experience.
‘I’ve received judgement from people close to me that you would hope would be celebrating your journey,’ she explains. ‘People say you’re too old, question why I did it and say it’s the wrong thing to do.
‘They’ve said to me, “you’ll be 76 when he’s 20” – as if I hadn’t thought about that. That was really hard and really hurt.’
Although some of her family members haven’t reacted or supported her in the way she had expected, her mum and friends have been amazing.
The support you need
For Sarah, the most important thing for her is having a network of friends for emotional support who you can ring and say you’re struggling. Her neighbours have also helped her, as has the solo mum community.
She also had a friend come down after she gave birth to help her with the baby for the first 10 days, to allow her to recover and to support her.
‘I was a bit scared when she left. I thought, “can I do it?” – but I got into a routine,’ remembers Sarah. ‘It’s great if you have loads of people around you but, if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it.’
Today, she has ‘absolutely no regrets’ about pursuing solo motherhood. ‘It’s the most amazing joy and love that I’ve ever felt, but also the hardest thing I’ve done,’ adds Sarah.
‘It can be scary but there’s nothing more amazing than growing your child, giving birth to them and nurturing them – especially if you thought you weren’t going to be able to do that.’
Sarah’s far from the only one to embark on this journey. In fact, 3,548 single women underwent IVF alone in the past year – an 82% increase since 2019.
Many call themselves Solo Mums by Choice and there’s even a dedicated UK Facebook group for this empowering subset of women, which has more than 4,000 members.
Emma’s story
Nine years ago, Emma Halliday found herself sat across from a friend who, at 45, was on a waiting list for counselling to grieve the child she’d never had. Why? She hadn’t found Mr Right.
The NHS worker realised that many women must be having the same problem and, after coming out of a long term relationship at 27 and being unable to find a serious partner since – she knew she could soon be in the same boat.
‘Hearing that was like a slap in the face – I knew that could be me,’ Emma tells Metro.
‘I’d been broody since I was a teenager and there was no way that I could imagine life without a child. I was starting to worry, questioning what was wrong with me and why I hadn’t found someone. I felt a little hopeless.
‘It was then and there that I decided by the time I get to 40, that if I haven’t found someone, then I’m going to do it alone.’
And that’s exactly what happened. In March 2022, Emma went to a fertility clinic in Leeds with the donor sperm she’d had shipped in from Denmark, and underwent IVF so she could become a mother.
Now 43, Emma has her son Xander who’s a year and nine months old, and has a fascination with dinosaurs.
Why become a solo mum?
‘After my breakup I went travelling, I had a new lease of life, but there was always that niggling feeling of wanting to be a mother,’ the mum-of-one explains. ‘I was trying to fight against it and tell myself “if it happens, it happens”, but it was just inside me – it always has been.
‘The clock was ticking and when I’d go on dates and be looking at them wondering what type of dad they’d be. They got this desperate version of me wanting to find a partner so I could be a mother.’
After making the decision to do it alone, Emma spent roughly £9,000 – a price which included the initial consultations, all tests and medications, as well as the IVF itself – and even underwent counselling to help her come to terms with using donor sperm.
Despite only a 17% chance of success, Emma became pregnant after the first embryo was implanted and enlisted her best friend Chloe to be her birthing partner, who came with her to her prenatal appointments.
‘I was incredibly nervous about taking my pregnancy test – I couldn’t tell immediately if there was a second line, so it was a quiet build up,’ she remembers.
But when that second line became apparent, she was elated.
‘I was in a state of happy disbelief,’ Emma adds. ‘I giggled, I cried and I sat there on my own, rubbing my tummy, feeling warm with gratitude.’
Clare’s solo motherhood story
For solo mum Clare Skelton, 49, the early days of motherhood were more challenging because she ended up giving birth to twins, Albert and Astrid, who are now three years old.
The primary school teacher from Berkshire was 45 when she made the decision to pursue solo motherhood and spent £7,500 in total on IVF.
She’d been in a relationship for a decade when she reached her mid forties but it became clear her partner didn’t want children, and while he supported her through the IVF process, the pair mutually ended their relationship when she became pregnant.
To conceive, Clare used donor sperm and a donor egg and travelled to Spain in the summer of 2020 for treatment.
‘I could have tried with my eggs, but it could have been quite a long, hard, emotional road. I made the decisions that I did to enable me to get pregnant as quickly as possible,’ she tells Metro.
While her journey has been largely positive, the mum-of-two says she has experienced a little bit of judgement.
Clare explains: ‘For some people it’s taken a while to kind of come round to you know what I’m doing – they need a little bit of time to think about it. My family and my friends have been absolutely amazing though.
‘You need to do what’s right for you, because at the end of the day, it is your life, not anyone else’s. It’s the hardest but most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done.’
People think solo motherhood will be harder
While some might assume that going through pregnancy without a partner is difficult, Emma would disagree. ‘Because I was on my own I had a great amount of people who actually helped me,’ she explains. ‘Whereas people who were in a couple, I felt like they didn’t have that much help, so I feel really lucky in that respect.’
The NHS worker and life coach even had her friend stay with her for the first week after birth, in November 2022, to look after Xander with her. She’d braced herself for motherhood to be really difficult alone but, again, this wasn’t the case.
‘I’d already lowered my expectations because I thought it was going to be really hard on my own, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’d expected it to be the pits,’ she adds.
Of course, Emma says, it’s not without its difficulties. After all, there’s the £75-a-day childcare costs, which she has to pay for even if she’s not planning on putting Xander in nursery that day. She also has to have eyes in the back of her head now he can walk – but that goes for any parent.
‘I never expected it to be this way. It wasn’t my plan A, but that’s the way it went. Now I couldn’t imagine it any other way,’ Emma says.
‘Being a solo mum to me has been that dream, that long awaited dream, of being a mother. It’s beautiful and I feel so fortunate that I get to experience this next chapter in my life with my little boy.’
Graph data sourced from Child Poverty Action Group.
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