I saw on the news recently that a woman in Sweden  has become the first in the world to have a baby after having a womb transplant – and now  doctors have been granted approval to carry out the UK’s first womb transplants. When I first heard this, I wasn’t even sure that I had heard it correctly, I really didn’t know how I felt  so I shared it with my husband and GW sisters.

My husband jokingly made up a headline: ‘You can now have a child without the pains of being pregnant’. I also heard: ‘it could completely remove the unconscious relationship between mother and child that begins in the womb and which is a vital part of being human’; that it also perpetuates the idea of: ‘a child at all costs’.  I feel that this is another example of the lack of acceptance faced by women who are living without children.

One of my difficulties with dealing with my childlessness is that when I am brave enough to share my circumstances I am asked if I have thought about IVF or adoption  – as if that’s something I’ve not already thought about or, even worse, as if it is going to instantly solve my ‘problem’. At one point I started to feel guilty about past decisions and that I didn’t try hard enough to have a child with my husband as I wasn’t interested in  these ‘solutions’. I wondered if maybe I really didn’t want to have a child enough in the first place. I started to see the uncomfortable truth that people found it hard not to try and fix my situation, that they found it difficult just to empathise with me. The reality is I am grieving and wanted to understand what childlessness meant for me, my marriage and my future. Until I understood, accepted and dealt with the grief, which is harder than I could ever have imagined, why would I want to bring an adopted child into my world, someone with a bag of other stuff that I may not be able to deal with anyway. So please do not try and fix me. All I need is a smile, a hug or an acknowledgement that I am here…

It would be great to hear your views and experiences too.