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My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

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Hello and welcome to this week's Podcast for Parents.

Now, there's been a lot of discussion this week about the IVF industry.

There were warnings from Sally Cheshire who chairs the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority

about the hard cell employed by some practitioners and a lack of honest information about success and failure rates.

The Barbican in London is holding a fertility

fest in which Maxine Peek, who's spoken about her own failure to conceive, will take part in a play called

Avalanche. So what persuades a woman to make the decision to use

donor sperm and donor eggs and embark on the efforts to have a child entirely alone?

Well Beth has done it and is now 11 weeks pregnant.

Genevieve Roberts has a two-year-old daughter and is the author of going solo.

Why did she make that decision? I was 37 years old and I'd always

believed that I would have children at some point. It was just part of the

fabric of the backgrounds of my life.

I wanted to have a fertility test just to find out whether my fertility was high and I expected it to actually come out quite high.

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