“It’s here – we’ve received the dreaded email,” I said to myself. The email that most couples who have been through fertility treatment receive at some point in their journey. The ‘Your storage is up for renewal’ email. We currently have five vials of sperm in storage at the fertility clinic, and they’ve been there since 2017.

How we got here

In 2017, we were newlyweds living in a state of married bliss. We were Laura and Sarah, a couple who, in a lot of ways, had already defied the odds: we grew up thousands of miles apart (I’m American; Sarah’s from Reading), but we started work on the same day, at the same company and in a city we had both separately just moved to. We hated each other when we first met, but hate and love are two sides of the same coin. We quickly grew to appreciate our differences and fell in love – for each of us, it was our first LGBTQ+ relationship. After just 10 months together, we hopped over to Australia, where we lived together for a year, then moved back to the UK where we settled, got engaged and became the first female couple to be legally married in the City of Westminster on the first day of marriage equality in England.

We’d talked about whether we wanted children, and the conversation had gone back and forth for months between us, so we finally added a deadline: we would decide for good if we wanted to go through the process of having children during a big family trip to the US in May 2017.

It was there, waking up in my home country, that I turned to Sarah and said, “I’d really love us to try for a baby.”

The plan was for Sarah to carry our firstborn and for me to carry our second. The first part of our plan worked well – Sarah had one round of IVF, which resulted in four embryos, the first of which became our first daughter, Annabelle, and the remaining three were then frozen in storage alongside our remaining sperm while we fell in love with being a family of three. We absolutely adored being mums; when Annabelle was two and a half years old, we decided we would try for another baby.

“How one email started the beginning of the end of our fertility journey”