I’ll have two babies with the same dad but I don’t know what he looks like

“This wasn’t the life I expected when I was growing up,” says Lucy, 41, who always imagined motherhood coming in a more traditional order – a partner, a wedding and then kids.

Instead, her journey to motherhood began with in vitro fertilization and donor sperm, a choice she made after realizing how much she missed seeing her sister and friend’s children during the pandemic.

She jokingly told her parents that she could have children on her own, and she recalls: “I expected them to laugh about it, but they said I should do it and were excited.

“I wasn’t expecting that reaction and it made me think I really should do this,” he said Radio 4’s Women’s Hour.

Lucy was engaged in her 20s and always thought she would become a mother. When she found herself single just before her 30th birthday, she says she went through a period of real grief about “What if this doesn’t happen to me?”

Lucy’s first son is now almost three years old and is pregnant again with sperm from the same donor.

He doesn’t know his identity or even what he looks like.

“I look at my son all the time and think how much he looks like the donor, but it’s impossible to know and it doesn’t matter because he just looks like himself.”

She is excited to give birth to her second child and says it “will be interesting to see what the new baby looks like and whether it will look similar or have similar characteristics.”

The number of mothers who decide to have a baby alone is increasing rapidly. Data from the UK fertility industry regulator HFEA shows that 3,147 single women in the UK received fertility treatment with donor sperm in 2019. By 2022, that number has risen by over 60% to 5,084, according to the latest available figures.

Nina Barnsley, director of the UK-based charity Donor Conception Network, says one of the biggest factors for women choosing the solo route is time, “both in terms of fertility and wanting children at a certain stage of life”.

Proactively choosing to be a single mother can come with additional emotional, social and practical challenges, says Barnsley.

Many women can expect questions about who the father is, which “while often well-intentioned, can feel intrusive.”

Lucy says she was open from the beginning about how she came to have her son.

He has already begun explaining his understanding to her, using language he describes as “simple yet honest.”

Most importantly, she wants him to “develop confidence in talking about this topic.”

“I don’t want her to feel like her family isn’t as acceptable or solid as someone who has two parents.”

Lucy ignores those who say her decision is selfish.

“A child’s happiness is not about having one or two parents; it is about love, attention and time.”

Even though Lucy knew choosing this route meant she would be a single mother, she never felt alone because her parents were heavily involved as part of the plan.

During her pregnancy in 2023, her mother became seriously ill, reshaping not only her parenting plan but also her world.

Last year, when her son was 18 months old, Lucy’s parents died within six weeks of each other.

“There were times when I thought about how to do this, but it was a situation where I just had to navigate because there was no other option.”

But she says her son helped her through those months of illness and loss.

“It made everything better because it was a huge distraction.”

Kim, now 30, is the adult child of a mother who, like Lucy, chose to become a single mother through a sperm donor.

Born in the North West in the mid-1990s, she became pregnant through donor insemination at a time when fertility treatment was less advanced and sperm donors could remain anonymous. There were no photos, no profiles, no means of contact.

He says his father’s absence never felt like a void, and he never got angry at his mother, Emily, or wished his family were different.

What shaped him more was the way Emily, a retired social worker, raised him rather than how she envisioned him.

“Seeing how much she did on her own gave me a strong sense of independence,” she says.

He adds that he doesn’t understand those who think his mother’s decision to go alone was selfish.

“The most selfish thing to do is to have children when you’re not absolutely sure you want them.”

Growing up separated from a long-term partner in her 20s, Emily was unsure about getting into another relationship and when she realized she could have a baby without a boyfriend, she knew “this was the way it was going to be.”

She says the best part of being a single parent is not having to negotiate or compromise.

“Once I made up my mind, no matter how hard it was, I never had to compromise and I could always do it my way.”

The 72-year-old said he had no regrets about the turn of events and that his son was “exactly the kind of person I would want and there couldn’t be a more ideal son for me.”

Additional reporting by Jo Morris and Emma Pearce.