When Mel Johnson split up from her long-term partner just before her 30th birthday, the breakup triggered a creeping anxiety that would stay with her throughout her early 30s. Even though she was ‘living her best life’ – going out, travelling, living abroad, enjoying time with a great group of friends, dating – the question she couldn’t shake was: am I going to miss out on motherhood?

“I just assumed I would meet somebody else eventually,” she says. “But when I was 36 going on 37 I realised: I just don’t think this is going to happen for me.” At 38, Mel decided to do something she’d been contemplating for years: becoming a solo mother via donor sperm. “It was a subject I just didn’t really know anything about and I didn’t know a single other person who had done it,” she says. “So I rang Manchester Fertility Clinic and said, look, is it a possibility? They said to come down and we’ll talk through it and when I did, I was told I could start trying as quickly as the start of my next cycle. After years of worrying about missing out on being a parent, hearing that felt like such a relief. So I decided to go for it via IVF.”

A year and a half and around £9,000 later (£1,000 for the donor sperm, £8,000 for the IVF treatment), Mel had her daughter, Daisy. Her doctors fertilised three of Mel’s eggs using donor sperm and the second transfer was successful, something she calls an “incredibly easy fertility journey, medically speaking”. With that, she joined a growing number of solo mothers in the UK, a group that, according to the latest statistics published by the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) has grown considerably in recent years. Reportedly, the number of children born from donor sperm more than tripled from under 900 in 2006 to over 2,800 in 2019, an increase driven by both female same-sex relationships and ‘single patients’. Mel launched The Stork and I to share her journey and find similar solo mums, but it’s become a bona fide business, with coaching courses that regularly sell out and a podcast that’s hit 200,000 downloads, highlighting how in demand this sort of information is.

“£9,000 later, I was pregnant”: the secrets and surprises of shopping for sperm in the UK