Louise Thompson

But then also growing our family is our legacy and it's our right.

And I should have been allowed the human right of having a safe and dignified birth, which would have allowed me to

leave procreation to chance where you know i could have sex with my partner and maybe maybe have another baby you know and that's not you know i know that fertility struggles are a very real problem and you know we are facing a population crisis there are many reasons why people are leaving having kids until much later in life and and so infertility is an inevitable

reaction to that so I'm absolutely not alone in this infertility journey our circumstances are just really different because you know of just like the scarring that I've been left with yeah and it feels it feels actually quite like

it feels quite nice just to be able to like talk about it and just quite like liberating because it is, you know, when I first worked with therapists quite early on, and I say early on, but probably like at the two year postpartum mark, they would say, oh, you know, if you like, have you thought about having more kids and how does that make you feel?

And that must be desperately upsetting.

And I was like, no, like, don't be ridiculous.

Like, I absolutely couldn't think about any of that.

And I think that there were just different milestones that they were holding me to.

Maybe they had other clients who were, you know, reaching that sort of like conventional two year mark and thinking, oh, maybe we'd like to have another child.

But it's so it's not something I can't sit here and say, like, I've yearned for this forever.

for a really long time.

We've only just felt good enough to kind of think about it.

And yeah, I've done an IVF cycle.

I've actually done two.

I did one when I was really, really busy.

That's another thing.

Obviously, I'm sure loads of people have come on this podcast to say make a plan, God laughs, or whoever laughs, whoever you believe in.

There were times when I wanted to do it before and then something else really hideous would crop up in my life, like some other major trauma to have to deal with, some perforation or a surgery.

And so it was always put on pause.