When you plunge into a world of trying to conceive a baby, you believe it’s going to be easy. After all, you’ve done all your messing around and travelling and you are settled, married (possibly), solvent, you own your house (again, possibly) and you work hard. For all intents and purposes, you are exactly the right person to provide offspring to the planet. You’re in the right frame of mind to try for a baby and you are excited and ready for the next stage of your life to begin. The problems start because no one tells you just how hard trying for a baby can be.
It’s not easy to get pregnant!
Of course, a lifetime of watching soaps and TV series have taught you that many women fall into bed with a beautiful stranger and bam – pregnant. So, why isn’t it happening for you? The months are falling by and, like clockwork, your period keeps on coming. You know you’re having enough sex – the app you have loaded to your phone tells you that. So, you head to the doctor. You never planned for this: you didn’t plan for infertility in either you or your partner. You didn’t plan to be poked and prodded and tested. You also didn’t plan to hear words like “unexplained infertility”, “low sperm count”, “hostile uterus”. You didn’t plan for any of this. However, this is life now, and you need a new route – a new hope. The good news is that there are more ways to make a baby than you think. Let’s explore them below:
There is hope!
- The first is adoption. You may not be able to have a baby that’s biologically yours, but that visceral need to be a mother still lies within. There are plenty of children who need a loving home, and love is something you have in buckets to offer. The adoption process is never easy, so look at this guide to adoption to learn more.
- The next option that many women look to when their bodies are incapable of carrying a pregnancy is surrogacy. This is the process that can happen in two ways: either you use a traditional surrogate and her eggs are fused with the sperm of your partner, and she carries the baby for you, or your eggs and your partner’s sperm is put together in a clinic and inserted into the surrogate – known as gestational surrogacy. It’s a long process, and a wonderful one, at that.
- If your body can carry a baby but your eggs just aren’t the right quality to make a pregnancy viable, you could go in for egg donation. There are many selfless women who donate their eggs for those who cannot use their own, and these are mixed with your partner’s sperm and reintroduced to your body so that your uterus can be ready for a pregnancy to occur.
- Lastly, if the infertility is male-factor, then sperm donation is an option. You can choose from a bank of sperm donors to carry a baby that is yours, too.
None of these methods follow a conventional pattern, but who wants to be conventional when the result is going to be a baby that you both love for the rest of your life? There’s more than one way to make a baby, and there is more than one way to make a mother.
