To get pregnant, I have resorted to artificial insemination. I want to openly talk about it because this is an opportunity to show my gratitude to all those anonymous donors who help many women to meet, like me, the dream of their life.
God bless IVF because it's never too late to conceive any more. However, having said that, I have to point out that going through IVF is a gruelling procedure; maybe that's why only a woman can go through it!
It's actually very beautiful when you can't conceive on your own, you can actually go to the doctors and with science you can create a child.
Of course, I could try IVF. But having watched my friend TV presenter Clare Nasir go through it, I know how tough the journey is. Emotional fool I may be, but even I can see that's too selfish a course of action to impose on my family.
We lost a baby at 11 weeks when I was 34, and we got married expecting we would have no trouble having another child, because I'd fallen pregnant that one time. But it just didn't happen and we did about four years of IVF, trying very hard to have a baby.
My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos.
I used to think about how I was conceived quite a lot when I was about 10 or 11, but I don't think about it at all now that so many other babies have been born in the same way.
I would rather do surrogacy before adopting. If I can't do it, I'd rather find someone who would do it for me.
I told her I wanted a plastic surgeon to sew me up, and I wanted her to freeze my ovaries, so I could harvest the eggs and have a biological child through a surrogate.
Each year thousands of embryos, no bigger than the head of a pin, are created in the process of in vitro fertilization, with the support of Congress, by the way.
I love that Tom Daley's talking about surrogacy.
IVF is a wonderful thing. One has to ignore the injections as the reality is that nobody is going to invent a pill that you can take to get a baby.
I now need to take a very aggressive approach to having a baby.
A lot of people have been asking me questions about IVF and surrogacy, and I'm glad that I can be a mouthpiece to that.
People who are infertile will be able to have their own genetic children. So may same sex couples, since it may well be possible to make eggs from a man's skin cells or sperm from a woman's.
My personal interest in IVF led me to author two reports into the availability of treatment on the NHS.
IVF became the only way for us to have children after I was treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma 10 years ago with fertility-destroying chemotherapy. And while the cancer treatment was predictably punishing for me, I was struck by the anguish of the IVF process and in particularly the failed cycle.
Not to be too detailed, but I've had an ectopic pregnancy, miscarriages and I've had fertility treatments. I've done all the stuff you can possibly do to try get pregnant.
Everyone has read about or knows someone who has gone through fertility treatments. It is an emotional nightmare, fueled by false hope and the promise of a treatment that will work.
An IVF patient is - is living and breathing hope. It's... it's, um... it's - You wouldn't do it if you didn't have a sense of hope. Why would you put yourself through it?
It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly... this was the way to go in the human species.
After 40, your chances of getting pregnant are between two and eight percent, and in my particular case, they were less than five percent.
I went through about 13 rounds of IVF before I got pregnant with Salome; it was very tough.
I think in vitro is a miracle and it has given me my precious little baby boy.
Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
