According to the NHS, 1 in 7 couples will face difficulties conceiving when they are ready to become parents, and often desperately want to have a baby.  

If you were to listen to the advice of fertility experts, you would be led to believe that your best chances of avoiding fertility problems would be to have your children in your early twenties.  The quality and number of a woman's eggs declines as she ages, increasing the risk of having difficulty conceiving and of being able to carry a pregnancy to its full term.  

In spite of these dire warnings, more and more women are putting off motherhood, needing to focus on establishing their careers and being financially able to provide for a child, before they even begin to think about trying to get pregnant.  The fact that most households require two incomes to manage the high cost of living, as well as the frighteningly extortionate cost of childcare doesn't help!  And some of us take longer than we expected to find that right person to have children with!  Or we might have had children in our late teens or twenties, but then in our thirties, meet the love of our life and want to share the joys of parenting more children with our new partner.  

In any case, over half of new mothers in 2017 were over 30.  And, as a result of this trend in women delaying motherhood, an increasing number are facing fertility problems.  

Many young women won't allow themselves to worry too much about their fertility, because they've told themselves that there is always the safety net of medical interventions, such as IVF.  In any case, they are just not ready or in a position where they feel able to bring a baby into their world and give that baby the time, care, attention and resources they want to be able to give.  They tend to take the view that they will "cross that bridge when they come to it".

It's often not until they have difficulties conceiving that couples look into IVF and discover that success rates are pretty disheartening.  They're no better than 40% for women under 35, and those odds rapidly worsen with age:  

29% for women under 35.

23% for women aged 35 to 37.

15% for women aged 38 to 39.

9% for women aged 40 to 42.

3% for women aged 43 to 44.

2% for women aged over 44.

For the majority of women, three cycles of IVF raise the chances of success to not much more than 50%.  At around £12,000 or more for three cycles of IVF, you would hope for a better than fifty-fifty chance of success, wouldn't you?  

Also, as many as 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, again with the risk increasing rapidly as we age.  In women over 30, 18% of pregnancies end in miscarriage.  In women over 40 it's 38% and it's as high as 70% in women over 45.  

Couples are often so put off by these scary statistics, as well as their own personal experience of heartache and disappointment, that they choose instead to go childless, rather than risk the expense and the painful prospect of repeated failure to conceive, or worse, loss of a much longed-for pregnancy, due to miscarriage.  

Often the most frustrating thing for couples is that, when they finally go to the doctor's for help, and after undergoing a series of intrusive tests, they're given a diagnosis of "unexplained infertility", which literally means their reproductive system is fine and there is no medical reason why they haven't conceived or been able to carry a pregnancy to term.  Surely, if the problem isn't medical, it must be psychological.  

Even if they do decide to try IVF, couples often don't dare to allow themselves to get their hopes up and believe they will succeed, for fear of the pain of further disappointment, but this fear and negative thinking may well be only further impeding their chances of success.  

Modern science is learning more and more about how the mind can both create and heal physical symptoms.  

While nature would prefer us to have babies early, and while eggs can decline in quality and number in our mid-thirties, it doesn't mean you can't have a baby later in life.  More and more, the evidence shows that you can use the power of your mind to influence the quality of your eggs and the healthy functioning of your body to create the best possible conditions for your baby to grow and develop, and you can eliminate the psychological and emotional blocks that may have been preventing you from being able to conceive.  

Various therapies have been developed from our newfound understaning of the mind-body connection which are extremely effective at doing just that.  RTT (Rapid Transformational Therapy), NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) are all examples of effective psychological and emotional interventions that work and that have been responsible for thousands of babies being born to exstatically happy and grateful parents.