Pride Angel

The new "Get Britain Fertile" campaign features a photograph of presenter Kate Garraway, made up to look elderly and pregnant. Her wrinkles and white hair juxtaposed with a fecund belly illustrate the main thrust of the campaign – to make British women aware of the decline in fertility by their 30s and 40s.

However, is there a grown woman left in Britain who's not already aware of this? Moreover, when are we, as a society, going to address a painful truth: that where timing is concerned, female fertility is not, as is often supposed, controlled exclusively by women, but also very much in the power of the men they are with?

There's much that's well intentioned about GBF. It claims to be aimed at both men and women. Garraway, an ambassador for the campaign, says she feels fortunate to have had children relatively late, and wants women to make "informed choices". However, GBF taps into the culture of misogyny surrounding female fertility. It feeds the urban myth of women "refusing" to have children because of careers, partying, or holding out for Leonardo DiCaprio.

These delusional "picky" females have been figments of the collective imagination for so long they need to be dusted down. Indeed, GBF is accompanied by a survey, stating that many women aged 18-46 are concerned about practicalities: ranging from loss of earnings and workplace inflexibility, to childcare costs and housing. All crucial issues, but for the purpose of this article, let's look at the third of women who say they want children but haven't yet found the right partner.

In my opinion that one-third is an underestimate. Even not finding the right man often turns out to be a euphemism for: "I met him, I spent years with him, but ultimately, he wouldn't have children." Put bluntly, many of these women at their fertile peak didn't refuse anything, their men did.

Like it or not, this is how men influence female fertility and, ultimately, female infertility. The mere thought is enough to inspire feminist panic: women, not men, should control their fertility. Who could disagree? It's also true that some women don't want children, period. And yet how many of us have met (or even been) the thirty-fortysomething, forced to abandon a long relationship because the man wouldn't start a family?

Such men may feel that the relationship isn't right, or don't want their freedom curtailed, or other reasons, all as valid as a woman making similar decisions. It only becomes unfair, verging on selfish, when men keep such insights to themselves for too long. These are the time-wasters, what I'd term the fertility-drifters, who think nothing of keeping women dangling for years on end.

It's not that these women are pathetic wimps, rather that often they can't win: if they push, they're pushy (humiliating); if they don't push, if they're respectful and patient, they'll waste even more time. Frequently, these men go on to start families with younger women, leaving their original partners scouring dating sites, lampooned as desperadoes on the hunt for viable sperm.

Some might say: "Diddums, that's life." Fine, so long as we acknowledge that this is something many women put up with during their fertile years, and that to castigate them is unfair. Sometimes it's not women who are picky, it's men. Ergo, such men should at least be part of the ongoing debate about late female procreation. After all, a stalled relationship at the wrong time with an immature, untruthful, or simply unwilling, man, is enough to compromise or even destroy a woman's fertility. If the GBF campaign really is aimed at both sexes, perhaps they need to include a photograph of a man with the caption: "Play fair and, by the way, sperm deteriorates too." Meanwhile, women may need another mantra – don't let anyone waste your precious time.

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Article: 19th May 2013 www.guardian.co.uk

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I’m Adam and currently working on the second series of the prime time show Don’t Just Stand There….I’m Having Your baby which airs on BBC3 at 9pm. Last series, first time Dads-to-be were shown how to be more supportive during their partner’s pregnancy and during the birth itself.

In one to one sessions with a fully trained midwife, the Dads were taught about many aspects of pregnancy and labour including cervical dilation, pain relief, massage, breathing techniques and birthing positions.

They were also given practical home work like wearing an empathy belly, looking after a robotic baby and watching a birthing video. We wanted to help him become the perfect birthing partner for Mum and make the whole experience more positive than petrifying!

Last year we worked closely with the Royal College of Midwives in the making of this series and they were very pleased with the result. The first series was very successful and the Dads we filmed found the experience both positive and rewarding as they became more equipped to deal with the arrival of their little ones.

This series we would love to meet and speak with gay and lesbian couples who are currently on the journey into parenthood. I would really like to hear your story and find out, as a first time parent, what this means to you and also how we could help.

If you have any questions and fancy a chat about the series please feel free to call me on 0208 008 4901 or email me on adam.lonergan@bbc.co.uk. Thanks for your time and hopefully speak soon. Adam.

Article: 21st May 2013 www.prideangel.com

Gay or lesbian? want to have a baby? find your donor or co-parent at www.prideangel.com

There is no doubt Freya McCallin was a wanted child. That she will always be loved unconditionally by her mum and large extended family is also incontrovertible. But there is another significant truth about Freya: she will never know her genetic father.

Indeed, as Freya’s mum Jessica travelled to Copenhagen from her home in South London to be inseminated with the donor sperm that produced her daughter, this omission from her child’s family tree was the one concern that preyed upon her mind.

For sperm donors in Denmark — unlike those in the UK who may be contacted by their offspring when they reach 18 — have a legal right to remain anonymous. Men who donate sperm there can’t be traced by any potential offspring.

This explains why the sperm donation industry in Denmark is the largest in the world, and why increasing numbers of British women are travelling there to undergo the quick and relatively inexpensive procedure that endows them with the greatest gift of all: creating a new life.

It also helps to explain why, because of seismic shifts in Britain’s fertility landscape — highlighted in last week’s Femail magazine cover story — the shape and make-up of our nation’s families is changing irrevocably.

'My concern is that the need to know who your father is, even if he has no meaningful role in your life'

Today, in part two of our investigation, we examine some of these new ‘diverse’ families, and speak to the single mothers — all professionals with degrees — who are raising donor children without fathers.

In last week’s dispatch, we interviewed educated women who have remained childless; either from choice or because they deferred motherhood in favour of their careers, only to find out they had passed the age of fertility.

As our report showed, the consequences have been dramatic: middle-class Britain is having fewer and fewer children, with larger families increasingly the preserve of the poorer and disadvantaged.

But the rise in middle-class women remaining childless is not the only factor at work here. Since 2008, when the law changed to allow single women to be donor inseminated, small, self-contained and fatherless family units like Jessica and Freya’s are burgeoning.

There are now two million lone-parent families in the UK — they account for one in four of the nation’s families — and rising numbers of them are headed by educated, middle-class women. Many of these, forced by the ticking of their biological clocks and their failure to find the right partner, have procreated by non-traditional methods such as sperm donation, egg donation and IVF.

Because typically these women are deferring motherhood until they are 35 when their fertility is in perilous decline, they are often having just one child. It is also financially very exacting to raise a child alone.

That is another reason why Middle England is producing fewer offspring. And why, conversely, poorer households — because benefits rise in line with the size of their family — who have relatively little to gain from limiting their fertility, are growing.

But what will be the emotional fall-out for this new generation of donor children who grow up without knowing their fathers? This is one of the great imponderables in this brave new world of diverse families.

‘The urge to discover our roots and our relationship with those who have provided half of our DNA is elemental, says Adrienne Burgess, joint CEO of the Fatherhood Institute. ‘The literature is clear: some donor children are haunted by their situation and go searching.’

Jessica McCallin, a writer and broadcaster from South-East London, chose a Danish donor for her daughter Freya because her family originates from the north of England, an area conquered by the Norsemen, and it seemed reasonable to assume she had Scandinavian ancestry.

She knew it would also be helpful to her child if she shared her blonde hair and blue eyes — as indeed Freya does. 'Not a day goes by when I don’t agonise about the consequences of my actions' Whether her daughter will be troubled by not knowing her father’s identity, she cannot say.

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Article: 8th May 2013 www.dailymail.co.uk

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It was a Friday, the day the pregnancy test was positive. Day 29 of my cycle, fifteen days after insemination. A drab August day. The rain drizzling down the window panes seemed incongruent with my mood, but I was struggling to identify my mood at all. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t wished for a positive test. It was exactly what we’d been hoping for, of course. And it had happened much sooner than expected. A huge success.

But it was a strange feeling and I skulked around the house, not sure what to do with myself. I didn’t feel any different from the previous day, week, month. Yet somewhere deep inside me, a complex manufacturing process was taking place: cells were dividing and multiplying, and something microscopic yet undeniably human was starting to take shape. I was on holiday from work and normally I’d be getting on with something or other: odd jobs around the house, some lesson preparation ready for the new school term…but now I was four weeks pregnant and it didn’t seem right just to carry on as usual. But what do you do when you’re four weeks pregnant?

What you don’t do when you’re four weeks pregnant is tell anyone. I knew that rule well enough, so after an excited text to my partner, Sally, I put my phone aside and (perhaps it was the effect of the miserable weather) found myself a ‘helpful’ chart on the Internet showing the percentage risk of miscarriage at each week of pregnancy. After a brief period of amazement that even to make it thus far, our little embryo had defied the odds of 3:1, in that same rain-inspired spirit, I focused on the 10% chance that I would still miscarry – a 10% chance that wouldn’t go down to 5% until we were to hear a heartbeat. And when would that opportunity arise? When placed on my lower abdomen, Sally’s stethoscope was sadly lacking in the ability to detect anything other than a rather embarrassing set of noises emanating from my intestines.

The next couple of weeks were exciting, secretive and notably uneventful. Sally encouraged me to stock up on tasty snacks: eating regularly would prevent me from lacking in energy and feeling sick and I dutifully snacked away, attributing a vague trembling in the legs or a slight rumble of the stomach to dangerously low levels of blood sugar.

The August Bank Holiday Weekend arrived, and Sally and I were at Manchester Pride. It was the Sunday, about 5pm and wandering the busy stalls I suddenly felt as though I might be sick. I’m not generally a very sickly person and I’d forgotten what nausea felt like. Confident that food was the answer, Sally led me to the row of burger vans while I shuffled along behind her, clocking alleyways and dingy corners where I might vomit unnoticed. A couple of hours later, after slowly picking at a baked potato and beans, the blandest food I could find, the nausea faded. We found some friends, gave the usual imaginative excuses for my glass of lemonade, and settled down to relive our early childhood, watching Toyah Willcox in Sackville Gardens.

Over the next few days the nausea would turn up in time for afternoon tea and make itself at home for the evening. By the following weekend it had come to stay and save for, ironically, half an hour when I first woke up, ‘morning’ sickness became my main daily activity, the day punctuated by attempts to force down various food items and galloped trips to the toilet for retching – no actual vomiting at this stage. I eventually settled on a fairly consistent diet of breadsticks, boiled eggs, small pieces of very mild cheese and watermelon.

September arrived and it was time to return to work for the new school term. The mere notion of teaching five classes of teenagers each day, followed by time spent planning lessons and marking their books seemed laughable in my current condition. Nevertheless, left with little choice, I armed myself with a roll of pedal bin liners and motion sickness wrist bands and, after guiltily confessing all to the school management, got on with it – albeit slipping out into the corridor now and again with a bin bag for a tactical retch, and surreptitiously shoving small cubes of cheese into my mouth as Year 11 exited, and Year 10 came in.

The worst time was always the evenings, and while this meant I generally managed fairly well where work was concerned, poor Sally got me at my worst each day. Arriving home from work at 7.30pm, she would usually find me lying as still as I could on the bed, perhaps emitting a faint moaning sound. Little would change until I’d wake up in the middle of the night, feeling almost normal and wondering whether beginning a nocturnal life was the answer.

Sally put aside her fears that she’d be stuck with this new miserable, retching girlfriend for life and focused her time on reading voraciously about pregnancy and obsessively sending off coupons for free stuff. It seems there are no trial-sachet lengths that companies will not go to in order to get the custom of mothers-to-be, and we were soon stockpiling sample packs of stretchmark lotions, nappy creams, fabric conditioner and even packs of nappies and the occasional towel.

Meanwhile both my nausea and my fury that no one had given me any kind of realistic warning about what the nausea would be like were coming to a peak. I was ready to do serious damage to the next person who suggested my problems might be solved by the consumption of ginger. I’d moved on to hot school dinners at lunchtime which were going down quite well, and at least providing me with some vegetable intake, but I was now vomiting every evening, and by nine weeks I stopped bothering to eat at all after 3pm; it was just a waste of good food.

At school rumours of my pregnancy were already rife: much to my bafflement, it seems wearing motion sickness bands during the working day is an obvious sign of pregnancy to today’s Year 11 girls. I would hear whispers as I arrived at my classroom door, “you can see it, look!” and I’d hold my tummy in as well as I could, and make sure my top was covering the extender clip on my trousers. Despite having lost five kilogrammes and having had to remove my rings from my fingers before they slipped off, there was now a slight bump becoming noticeable, although only really obvious when I was naked.

At twelve weeks the midwife came to visit. After a rather amusing moment where she asked for Sally’s genetic history, and we had to remind her of the use of donor sperm, she asked me to lie flat on my back while she prodded my tummy with some midwifery device. And there it was, a heartbeat, inside me, that wasn’t my heartbeat. Suddenly I felt an amazing sense of relief – until now, no one else had offered any confirmation that I was actually pregnant. I’d done the test myself and then felt sick. People just believe you, but what if it had all been in my head? Anyway, it wasn’t – there was something inside me that wasn’t me. Something alive, and in a week’s time at the scan, we’d get the further confirmation – that this creature was a baby.

Article: 5th May 2013 by Lindsey, West Yorkshire

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A gay couple in Israel have started a campaign, asking for help to start a family after spending their entire savings on several failed surrogacy and adoption attempts, as Israel forbids surrogacy for gay couples. The gay mobile app Grindr has pledged a weeks worth of revenue towards the couple’s campaign, through its charitable arm Grindr for Equality. The couple are now seeking to find a surrogate in the US.

As well as donating revenue to Grindr for Equality, the app will also feature an advert which will encourages others to donate money towards the efforts of couple Yuval and Liran. The couple posted the YouTube video asking for help after several failed attempts at surrogacy abroad, and after being declined for adoption through several channels.

In the video they say they feel “castrated” by the law in Israel which does not allow surrogacy for gay couples, and tell their story about spending their entire savings, over $120,000 (£78,000) on the attempts. Their campaign asks supporters to post photographs of themselves with the message: “We want them to have a baby too”. Joan Rivers is among those who have already shown support for the campaign.

Grindr will donate a week’s worth of revenue made from the sale of its paid version Grindr Xtra, towards the campaign. Joel Simkhai, CEO and founder of Grindr said: “I read about Yuval and Liran’s emotional personal story and was impressed by their creativity in pursuing their dream of fatherhood, and their persistence, recruiting international celebrities such as Joan Rivers, to help raise awareness that in so many parts of the world the joy of parenthood and other aspects of family are still not available to gays who are not equals in the eye of the law.

Yuval and Liran are now pursuing surrogacy in America, aided by the LGBT Jewish organisation A Wider Bridge

Article: 10th April 2013 www.pinknews.co.uk

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TOWIE Celebrity, Bobby Cole Norris who is openly gay, staring in Reality show ‘The only way is Essex’, spoke about his desire to become a dad at yesterday’s Building Families Show, The Hilton, London. Bobby has confessed: "I've been doing a little bit of thinking and pondering and realised that I want to start a family.

"I've always wanted to be a dad and I've realised now that it is an option and there is a way around it." Bobby adds: "I'm never going to find a wife, but I can find a surrogate, so I'm just looking for the right egg donor at the moment. "I'm gonna take the right person with me and go and have a good chat at the clinic."

Chantelle Houghton from TOWIE recently bit back at Bobby’s comment that he wanted a ‘gaybe’ as he calls it, saying "I'm not against gay men being fathers, but it sounds to me that he wants a new accessory rather than a baby that needs love and attention 24/7."

Bobby didn't take too kindly to those comments, and took to Twitter to hit back at mum-of-one Chantelle. He tweeted: "Hugely disappointed with @chantellehought comments in @new_magazine this week #judgemental." Bobby also wrote: "I do not "want a new accessory", there is a major difference between wanting to be a parent and wanting a new bag #ridiculous."

The Building Families Show brought together the world’s leading IVF & Surrogacy specialists, including the leading parenting connection website Pride Angel which has over 21,000 members including egg donors, sperm donor and co-parents from around the world.

Erika co-founder of Pride Angel, and daughter Emily who is a huge fan of Bobby was delighted to be photographed with the TOWIE star.

Article: 7th April 2013 Pride Angel

Ask Janis Hetherington what kind of mother she is and she replies, without hesitation, ‘unconventional’. 'I’m not a “mummy” person at all,’ she says. ‘But I’m a brilliant father. I had to be both, so parenthood was quite schizophrenic in lots of ways.’ In 1972, Janis, now 66, made history as the first British lesbian to have a child by artificial insemination using sperm from a donor.

Her son Nick, 41, now a happily married screenwriter living in New York, has the unique distinction of being the first child in this country to grow up with same-sex parents — a revolutionary concept at the time of his birth in 1972. Born into a family which consisted of his mother Janis and her partner Judy, who had a young daughter of her own, Nick was nine months old when Judy died of a heart attack, aged 30. He was two when Janis met her current partner, Barbara, who became his second ‘Mum’.

Today, same-sex parenting is more or less accepted in Western society, but for Janis and Nick it was a sometimes difficult experience, and it is only now they feel comfortable enough to acknowledge the fault lines in their relationship. Janis says: ‘It felt wonderful to be a pioneer, but I was incredibly lonely because I was the first. People who opposed what I was doing waited for me to fail, so perhaps I was unable to enjoy motherhood in the way I might have liked. ‘Knowing what I know now, though, I would still have gone ahead with it.’

Dressed in a waistcoat and suit, her grey hair scraped back into a bun, Janis could easily pass for a country gent as she stokes the log fire in her 17th-century Oxfordshire house. In the kitchen, however, her feminine side flourishes. A brilliant cook, she shares recipes and doles out home-made chutney.

The overall impression is of intellectualism underpinned by a vulnerability borne from a lifetime of being judged — not only by those morally opposed to her choices, but by her own son. Today, Janis and Nick agree they share ‘an amazing bond’ — but it wasn’t always so. As an angry young man, he found her wanting.

When Nick first moved to America 20 years ago, he didn’t speak to Janis for two years because their relationship was so strained. It took ten years for them to mend fences. By comparison with his childhood, his adult life looks conventional. He married Soo Kim, 42, a TV producer, in the Caribbean two years ago, and they hope to have a child soon.

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Article: 5th March 2013 www.dailymail.co.uk

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A key group representing fertility specialists in the U.S. has shifted its messaging and now says that healthy women over the age of 50 should not be discouraged from trying to become pregnant using donor eggs or embryos.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has long said that women older than 50 should be "discouraged" from seeking fertility treatments. But new guidelines, published this month in the Journal of Fertility and Sterility, reverse that stance. The group now says women between 50 and 55 who are healthy and "well prepared" for child rearing should be allowed to receive donated eggs and embryos.

“The Committee believes that achieving a pregnancy through egg donation after age 50 is not such a significant departure from other currently accepted fertility treatments as to be considered ethically inappropriate in postmenopausal women,” the group says in the paper. For most women over 50, pregnancy is not an option, since the average of menopause is 52. While most women wouldn’t even want to become pregnant after that age, some do, and the ASRM says there is no reason why these women can’t raise children, as many already do as grandparents.

“There is, therefore, no reason to assume that society will be harmed by allowing older individuals to procreate, or that older women and their partners lack the physical and psychological stamina for raising children,” the ASRM says in its paper. “Also, because older men may father children, denying women a successful alternative for reproduction at ages equivalent to men is prejudicial.”

Nonetheless, the ASRM notes there are physical risks to becoming pregnant after 50. Dr. Tom Hannam of Toronto’s Hannam Fertility Centre explains that it’s not the conception process that’s risky; in fact, that stage is fairly simple. The prospective mother takes hormone pills for a few days to build up her uterine lining and then the fertilized embryo is transferred to her uterus in a simple in-office procedure.

But it’s the pregnancy itself that can be difficult, Hannam says. “The risks from the conception are not that high. It’s the complications-risk during the pregnancy that can be concerning,” he told CTV New Channel. “It’s clear that as women age, the health concerns that women have over the age of 50 are more likely to be amplified during pregnancy.”

Those concerns include the risk of hypertension, gestational diabetes and the need for caesarean section. Studies on the small number of women who have achieved pregnancy after 50 suggest all these risks rise for older mothers. Hannam says it would have to be up to a fertility specialist to decide if a patient over 50 is fit enough for pregnancy.

“Ultimately, it has to be individualized. And when we look to women over 50, one would have to be very careful indeed,” he says. While the ASRM guidelines are meant for U.S. fertility specialists, Hannam says they will affect Canadian women too. That’s because since 2004, it’s been illegal to offer egg donors financial compensation in Canada, so the vast majority of egg donation takes place in clinics in the U.S.

“Because it’s illegal to pay a woman for her eggs, most women who want to use donor eggs are going to the U.S.,” Hannam says. But he says the guidelines will also help doctors like him in Canada because they give him some literature to refer to patients who are considering pregnancy after menopause. “I’m glad there are articulated limits in the U.S. It’s going to help people make choices,” he said.

Article: 28th March 2013 www.ctvnews.ca

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With her blond bob, convertible car, cigarette in hand and cropped top emblazoned with the letters YOLO ("You Only Live Once"), this is an Alice in Wonderland the world has not seen before. Like Lewis Carroll's original, this cartoon Alice is curious about the world – "she gives up her cash to fly around rash" – but the moral here is that this twentysomething Singaporean is so busy being "wild and reckless" that she stands to lose her chance of starting a family.

Welcome to adult education in marriage and fertility, Singapore-style.

"Alice" is one of 15 fairytales revamped for a new government-backed scheme to encourage Singaporeans to get married and start having babies earlier. Faced with a rapidly ageing society, skyrocketing housing prices, low birth rates and a population that works the longest hours in the world, this country of 5.3 million people has made various attempts over the years to encourage its citizens to marry and procreate, from government-funded speed-dating schemes to educational flyers on how to flirt. Now, however, it is changing its tactics in search of a happy ending. Aimed at 21- to 30-year-olds, the "Singaporean Fairytale" was created by four final-year university students who wanted to "find an interesting way to connect with young adults … on what it takes to start, live and be a family in Singapore", says the project manager, Chan Luo Er, 23.

"Fairytales are very accessible, as almost everyone grew up with a fairytale or two – our little poem on a woman's declining fertility as she ages ties in quite nicely with the Golden Goose."

The fairytales – which have been distributed by leaflet to universities around Singapore – include versions of Cinderella, the Three Little Pigs, Rapunzel and Snow White, each involving a reworked tale that relates to fertility, sex or marriage, and a resulting moral. The lesson with "careless" Alice, for example, is that "the extended adolescence of twentysomethings today has a biological cost for women" and the story ends with a stark warning: "After 40, [fertility] drops 95%."

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Article: 22nd March www.guardian.co.uk

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Leading UK Documentary Company Wants to Hear Your Co-parenting Story

Award-winning television production company Windfall Films, is researching a documentary about modern families and co-parenting.

If you’re based in the UK and are a co-parent, searching for a parenting partnership, or going through a co-parent pregnancy, we’d love to hear about your journey. We’d simply like to talk at this stage. Getting in touch will not in any way commit you to taking part.

Windfall Films has a trusted reputation and proven track record in making sensitive documentaries with a committed approach for the BBC, Channel 4, and all major broadcasters.

Our programmes have not only won awards but many have been used to help train doctors, social workers, and teachers. Please see more about us on our website: www.windfallfilms.com.

For a confidential chat, please get in touch with producer Kim Duke: kimduke@windfallfilms.com or 0207 251 7676.

Article: 19th March 2013

Read more about co-parenting and finding your ideal co-parent at www.prideangel.com