The IVF widow, 20 years on
Twenty years after Diane Blood won the fight to have IVF from her dead husband’s sperm, she and her eldest son talk to Victoria Lambert
Liam Blood looks like his father: thick dark hair, long lashes, wide smile and gentle expression. There is no mistaking the resemblance – especially when you compare Liam, today smartly dressed in a jacket and tie, with a photograph of his dad, Stephen, on his wedding day.
But even though Liam is now 18 – the same age his father was when his parents met – his mother Diane, 50, is struggling to think of other shared traits. Does Liam have his father’s sense of humour? Personality?
“Not really,” says Diane, after thinking carefully. She looks around the warm, comfortable Worksop bungalow where the family lives: there are piles of electronic game equipment around the TV, a drum machine in the kitchen, photographs and home-made artwork on the wall.
“His father was very practical and Liam can do anything,” she finally says. “He could rewire the house if you needed it.”
Liam adds: “I’m similar to Dad in that I like the outdoors.”
However, this charming young man has never been able to ask his father to join him for a walk or bike ride in the nearby woodlands. Stephen died of bacterial meningitis in 1995, aged just 30, three and a half years after he and Diane married.
Liam and his younger brother Joel, now 14, were both conceived through IVF, using sperm harvested in the days before Stephen’s death. Incredibly, the couple had discussed what might happen in just such a scenario a few weeks before he fell ill, and Stephen had said he hoped Diane would still have his children.
Yet their existence is not just tribute to Diane’s incredible determination to become a mother – at the time, IVF success rates were significantly lower than now – but also to her dogged persistence in fighting a legal battle of immense complexity, which she won 20 years ago this week.
In a case that attracted worldwide attention, lawyers sought to gain permission for her to use Stephen’s sperm posthumously, which was illegal as it had been extracted while he was in a coma, with no written permission. Despite opposition in Parliament and from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the Court of Appeal ruled that the case was unique and she should be allowed to seek fertility treatment within the European Community, although not in the UK.
Diane, then a freelance advertising executive, called the decision “a victory for common sense and justice” and not long after embarked on IVF treatment in Brussels where both sons were conceived.
“I just wanted the right to do what I thought was right for me. And to be left alone to get on with it.”
The night we meet is exactly 20 years after the judgment in her favour, on February 6, 1997 – which would have been her husband’s 31st birthday.
Diane recalls a day of press conferences, interviews and stalling tactics by the HFEA. It was to be another three weeks before she and her team of “bright clever people who fought for human rights” – including prominent barrister Peter Duffy (who died young himself at 44) and Lord Lester QC – could sit down at a hotel in west London and celebrate. In 2003, she had to go back to court to fight for Stephen’s name to be placed on the birth certificates.
Despite not prompting a change in law, the Blood case made academic books and even the GCSE syllabus, a fact which amuses Liam. “I didn’t know, until a sixth-form girl told me she had read about me, that we were in a religious studies textbook. That was weird.”
At the time, Diane was labelled “ghoulish” by some commentators, but says the public was firmly behind her. When Liam and Joel were born, she received piles of congratulations cards and baby clothes. Even now, strangers send letters. Liam understands the nation’s fascination but points out that this is all he has ever known. “I can only compare it to doing things before the internet. I don’t know what the world would be like without it.”
Joel is soon to start work experience in IT; Liam is studying production arts at college. He hopes for a future in technical theatre, and his 18th birthday last month was spent operating the spotlight for the panto at the New Theatre Royal, Lincoln. Diane and Joel joined him for cake between shows.
Isn’t a landmark birthday exactly the time you would think about knowing your father?
“I think it would be nice, but he has never been here. I have only known him as this person I never met. It has never been real and it never will be.
“I almost think it would be seem a bit strange to have a dad around.”
Does Diane feel the same? “There have been times I wished Stephen was here; times I wished I had his opinion on something. But as the years move on that is harder to imagine.”
Diane has not had another relationship since Stephen died. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to meet anybody – it’s just that I never have. I don’t think I have ever said there wouldn’t be anybody else, but they haven’t come along. “But I don’t feel lonely,” she says. She acknowledges that her desire to have Stephen’s children posthumously was “to an extent, honouring him”, but that wasn’t her entire motivation. “It was my life, and I wanted to have children with someone I loved. I lost Stephen but I didn’t lose all the other things we’d planned. I didn’t lose the ability to have children.
“I wanted them in spite of the fact he had died, not because he died. And then I just wanted to continue quietly with the rest of my life.”
That, however, has not happened. Diane is still a port of call for women and men around the world who find themselves in similar situations, or students studying posthumous conception.
In all the hurly-burly of the court case and then single motherhood, does she wonder if she was able to mourn the loss of Stephen properly?
“It didn’t affect the grieving process,” she says adamantly. “But it wasn’t a case of one grief – but many griefs. Not just grieving for my husband but grieving for the life I lost, too.” She adds: “The feelings slow down as years go by, but there are wistful moments.”
But Diane has been busy. She wrote a book about her experiences, Flesh and Blood in 2004, and took the boys back to Brussels to meet the team at the IVF clinic where they began life. She has completed an MA in the study of autism at Sheffield Hallam University, and is now hoping for funding to do a PhD relating to educational law.
She worries about the financial and emotional toll on parents when fighting for their children – her case cost £150,000 and she only recouped 60 per cent. “I never thought I would be a campaigner. I was Mrs Goody Two Shoes, then I became a rebel. Now I think things don’t have to follow the way they have always been.”
She looks at Liam and Joel with maternal pride: “Both my boys are good at solving problems.” No need, then, to ask how closely they resemble their mother.
‘I lost Stephen, but I didn’t lose all the other things we’d planned’