Question: Hi Claire! Thanks for the great Wallington Girls chat yesterday! We got a lot out of it. I'm guessing Greg was embarrased because of us :) He is quite amazing :P But so are you! I just wanted to ask, if you were ever put into the situation of deciding to have IVF, and you didn't want to, what other alternative would there be?

Claire O'Donnell answered on 24 Jun 2010:

Hi Yasmin,
I thought it was great too. I thought the bit with Greg was really funny and I found it hard to type the answers to my questions for laughing at the comments from you lot!! Thanks for the compliment too, I guess I’m might be amazing in a slightly different way though :D. I’ll show it to my daughters who can’t believe anyone in their right mind would vote for me:)
To answer your question, it depends on the reason you’re having IVF and how much the couple want the child to be born using their own eggs and sperm. If there is a problem with the man’s sperm but the woman doesn’t have any problems herself then you could use something called donor insemination. You’ve probably heard of sperm donors, they’re men who agree to give their sperm for the treatment of couples where the man can’t produce sperm or has a disease that he could pass on to a child. Well, the sperm from the donor is treated in a lab and tested to make sure it’s all ok and then placed in the woman’s womb at the time she ovulated and everybody keeps their fingers crossed that it will fertilise her egg and a pregnacy will result.
If the woman can’t produce eggs then another woman can donate her eggs to be fertilised by the man’s sperm – you might have heard of sisters doing this for each other. The embryo is then replaced in the woman who is to be the mother. To be honest, this only saves the egg collection step of IVF because the woman who’s going to carry the baby has to have hormone injections to get her body ready to accept the embryo and then more injections to maintain the pregnancy until the embryo implants and is securly in place.
If you only wanted you own eggs and sperm to be used you’ve not got much of an alternative to IVF but obvioulsy adoption is always an option. There is something called surrogacy where another woman offers to have the baby for the couple. In this the man’s sperm is used to fertilise this other woman’s eggs in the same way as the door insemination I described before and then when the baby is born she give the child to the couple. As you might imagine this is a fairly tricky business with all sorts of potential problems; what if the woman wants to keep the baby waht happens if something goes wrong and the woman gets really ill. Because of all these risks, you can’t have surrogacy on the NHS and most clinics wouldn’t do this either.