If you can afford to help your daughter be a mum, you don’t think twice...

susIe anglesey, 66, a wine consultant, is married to alex, an artist, and lives in oxford. she paid the £9,000 for Ivf which led to the birth of her grandchild, elise.

SUSIE remembers very clearly a dark day in the spring of 2011. Saskia, the elder of her two daughters with her ex-husband, had been having such bad periods she was taking a packet of pain-killers every month.

‘As she and her partner were planning on having children, she had decided to get checked out with a routine laparoscopy. As soon as the gynaecologist walked in and I saw his face, I knew it was going to be bad news,’ she says.

‘He said both my fallopian tubes were severely infected and I would never be able to conceive naturally,’ remembers Saskia Boujo, 38, a former primary school teacher, who lives in London.

‘I remember thinking this is a nightmare. This is not happening. But I could see in my mum’s eyes, this was real.’

Susie adds: ‘It was a devastating moment. As he was talking to her, she was trying to hold in her emotions. He was being very reassuring, saying she was a perfect candidate for IVF, but nonetheless that sort of news is life-changing.’

Susie, too, was reeling. ‘When you find out your daughter, who is such a maternal person, might be deprived of one of the greatest gifts, it’s hard to take — very hard.

‘I wasn’t thinking about the lack of grandchildren ( the longed- for baby would have been Susie’s first grandchild), it was just Saskia and her loss that was in my head.’

Saskia and her partner resolved to get treatment as soon as possible — so went private.

‘But we were clueless about what it would cost,’ she says. ‘When we realised, I discussed it with my mother and she said everything you’d want to hear: “Just go for it. I will help you financially.”

‘Even with my partner’s salary (he was working as an administrator for a surveying company) combined with my teaching salary we would never have been able to afford IVF treatment privately.’

Susie says: ‘I didn’t look on it as a sacrifice. If you can afford to do it — and I

could afford to do it — then it’s not something you think twice about. You want to be able to help if your child is unhappy or in a difficult situation.’

By September 2011 Saskia was pregnant after only one IVF cycle. Susie paid the £9,000 bill. And when her grandchild was due to be delivered at the Portland Hospital in London, she was close by.

‘I knew Saskia was going to have an elective caesarean in the afternoon,’ she recalls. ‘I said I wouldn’t go in until the next day to allow them to have a private family time. But I wanted to be near the hospital, so I sat by myself in a cafe nearby and waited for the phone call. And when it came it was wonderful. I wept and went home very happy.’

Unfortunately when Elise was five months old, Saskia and her partner separated. ‘Maybe it was partly the extra pressure of IVF,’ she reflects.

Saskia went on to marry her childhood sweetheart, Gerry, a banker, and have another baby, Uma, 14 months ago, again with IVF (paid for by her husband this time). Susie now has a third granddaughter from her younger daughter.

Saskia has given up teaching and now runs mybeehive.co.uk, a website which offers nutritional and emotional support to would-be parents trying to conceive. Her mother gave her a shot at success, but she knows others are not so lucky.

‘The fact that NHS funding is being cut implies that only the elite can afford to have a baby. Having a family is not a privilege, it’s a right that everybody has. It’s simply not fair.’