More and more women in this country are choosing to have a baby without a partner. The organization Single Mothers By Choice has grown in recent years. The federal government does not record data on the group but, businesses like sperm banks and fertility centers say they’re seeing more single women clients, too.
For many women the exhaustion of trying to find a match through dating outweighs the costs of parenting alone. And some say the decision to get pregnant using fertility treatments is out of necessity, not choice.
“These women are really saying this is not how I envisioned my life,” said Ellen Glazer, a clinical social worker in private practice in the Boston area. She counsels women who are in their late 30s to early-40s considering single motherhood. "But they don’t want to lose the opportunity to try with their own eggs.”
Time is short to get pregnant so they make a decision that’s expensive — the high costs of the treatment and of parenting, and whether they have support systems they can rely on.
“That plays a huge factor in whether they feel they can do it on their own,” Glazer said.
At-home insemination kits start at about $130. The next level is intrauterine insemination, or IUI. Then there’s in vitro fertilization, or IVF, which can cost more than $40,000 for a successful pregnancy.
"You have to recreate the natural conditions on your body in the lab,” said Dr. Fernando Akerman, the medical director of the Fertility Center of Miami.
There’s a lot that goes into fertilizing an egg and implanting an embryo. Akerman points to the incubators, temperature requirements and patients’ anesthesia. “That is what is increasing the cost of the procedure. When you do the insemination, you place the sperm inside the uterus, and it's not simple, but it's a much simpler procedure than the in vitro fertilization,” he said.
That cost is why some women opt for IVF abroad.
Lydia Desnoyers from Miami is 41 and she chose IVF to become a single mom.
“I was financially in a really good place, emotionally, mentally — I was just ready,” said Desnoyers. “The only thing I wanted most at that point was becoming a mom.”
Desnoyers chose a fertility center in Barbados to try intrauterine insemination, first. When that didn’t work after two attempts, she received IVF and got pregnant. She paid nearly $17,000 for all of it.
Desnoyers is a certified public accountant who also coaches other women interested in choosing single motherhood, too.
“It doesn’t mean that I can’t meet somebody later,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that I can’t meet a wonderful man who probably already has kids himself and we have a blended family and it works out."
She no longer feels the pressure of dating just to meet a father for her children — and that, she said, is priceless.
