At the age of 19 Hayley Haynes was told that she wouldn’t be able to have children as she was born without a womb, ovaries or Fallopian tubes. A discovery that, as she told The Telegraph newspaper in London, devastated her:
“When they told me I had no womb I was so confused I felt sick. My biggest fear was never having children. Suddenly a huge piece of my life was missing. I felt like half a woman and was embarrassed. How I was going to tell a guy I was genetically male when I started dating?” she said.
However Haynes did start dating, her friend that she confided her fears too, and that man became her husband, Sam.
The couple wanted to have children, and were given a glimmer of hope when a previously missed, very small womb, just a few millimetres in size, was spotted on a scan. Haynes, 28, could not conceive naturally, however doctors told her that IVF could be an option.
After a course of hormone tablets the Haynes’ underwent IVF using an egg donor, blitzing through their savings to pay for the treatment. The wait for the result was agonising.
“I was so nervous. We only had one shot and couldn’t afford to go through it all again. I desperately wanted to be a mother and knew if there were no viable eggs or the implantation wasn’t successful I’d be distraught,” said Haynes.
However the news was positive – with an added surprise. Both eggs had taken, and this week Haynes gave birth to non-identical twins, Avery and Darcey.
The happy story follows on from the groundbreaking work by Swedish medical researchers in 2014 that saw the first women to have a womb transplant give birth.
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