Magic of miracle babies
There’s something very touching and bittersweet about likeable, larky Ed Sheeran describing his daughter as a “miracle baby”. And it’s to his credit that the stratospherically successful singer-songwriter has alluded to the secret pain behind the public success.
Sheeran, 30, and his wife Cherry Seaborn, who tied the knot in 2018, had been trying to conceive for some time, with no luck. They had started considering IVF when they took a holiday in the South Pole.
It was there that baby Lyra Antarctica was conceived. They do say that men need to keep their business end cold in order to preserve their swimmers, so maybe it was the sub-zero effect?
Or, more feasibly, just stepping off the career merrygo-round of performing and touring and recording to a landscape of incomparable beauty will have allowed all the stress hormones to ebb away.
I’ve heard this from my own friends, who fell pregnant “spontaneously” after making their first appointment to have their infertility (technically, their subfertility) investigated. They acknowledge they are among the lucky ones.
I’m one of those who embarked on many gruelling years of expensive, intermittently soul-destroying IVF treatments in order to have a family. I’m ashamed to admit these other couple’s happy experiences occasionally felt like a dagger in my heart, even as I did my best to conceal it beneath congratulations and hugs.
But I have two children now, so that makes me one of the lucky ones as well.
There’s no escaping the fact that infertility is on the rise due to factors as wide-ranging as diet, lifestyle and, it is suggested, even pollution. One in six UK couples will have difficulty conceiving. One in three will be affected by low sperm count. Pre-pandemic, around 70,000 IVF cycles took place annually in a sector worth £320 million.
Yet Mother Nature works in mysterious ways. A French study has shown that among women under 35 with unexplained infertility, 45 per cent become pregnant after failing to have a baby through IVF.
What’s that about? Nobody knows. The most enduring human truth is that babies are a blessing and for those who have endured infertility, finally being able to cradle their newborn is the most miraculous moment of their lives.