Thaindian News

Brisbane, Feb 27 (ANI): An expert has revealed that an increasing number of professional women in their 30s are opting to start a family on their own.

‘The numbers are creeping up. Compared to 20 years ago, [this trend] has dramatically increased,” Brisbane Times quoted Professor Michael Chapman, of IVF Australia, as saying.

Di Morgan, 42, is single, but that did not stop her from having a baby.

She is expecting her first baby next month after receiving a sperm donation from a 24-year-old in the US.

Morgan estimates she spent more than 100,000 dollars on seven rounds of IVF treatment, a swag of natural therapies and treatment for endometriosis over two years in her quest to get pregnant.

‘I had always wanted children in my early to mid-30s,’ said Morgan. ‘There was this guy and it didn’t work out … By the time I turned 39 I thought, ‘Right I am going to do this.’

Caroline Lowther, 41, a business consultant from Melbourne, was also 39 when she wanted to start a family, but had no partner.

Rather than spending thousands on IVF, she became pregnant via a ‘friend with benefits’ - a choice she described as ‘a lot more complicated and emotionally tied up’.

Lowther, however, admits that being a single mother to a daughter, now 2, was ‘the most confronting and difficult thing’ she had ever done.

The medical director of Fertility First, Anne Clarke, said single women now made up 4 per cent of her patients. Ten years ago it was ‘negligible’.

‘There has been a massive trend of partnering later and a lot more education about a woman’s fertility,’ Dr Clarke said.

A gynaecologist with Sydney IVF, Devora Lieberman, said she was seeing a ’small, steady stream’ of single women, although lesbian couples were far more common. (ANI)