'I was waiting for a man to have a baby with. Then at 40, I decided to do it on my own.'

Bah-boom... Bah-boom... Bah-boom.    

It was October 16, 2019. Bianca’s 41st birthday. She was six weeks pregnant. Here, at her ultrasound, she was hearing her baby’s heartbeat for the first time. 

Bah-boom... Bah-boom... Bah-boom.

“It was the most surreal thing,” Bianca remembers of the moment. “There is nothing to explain the happiness. It took away all the heartache I’d previously had from the failed rounds.”

Bianca had become pregnant through IVF. 

Her first three rounds were unsuccessful. Her fourth, when she used her only frozen embryo, resulted in the birth of the centre of her universe.

At 40, Bianca joined the growing number of women who choose to become a parent without a partner.

Listen to Get Me Pregnant, Mamamia's podcast that makes understanding assisted fertility easy. Consider this your no-BS guide!

“I'd always wanted children, but the timing never fell into place. I had always been pretty focused on my work,” Bianca, who worked in immigration for most of her career, explains.   

Bianca had become pregnant through IVF. Image: Getty.  

Like most, she had romanticised the ‘script’ of being married by the time she was 30, having a couple of kids and living in her white-picket-fence house with a labrador. 

That hadn’t happened for her. It was just the way the cards had landed. 

At 19 she was engaged. Three months before the wedding, they separated. At 35, she married. At 39, she divorced. 

At 40, she was newly single, had decided to change careers and, most importantly, began flirting with the idea of having a baby on her own. 

She had some hesitation about entering parenthood solo. 

Her concerns were never regarding her ability to parent, and more about if her child would be treated differently.

“What will happen on Father’s Day at school? What is going to happen when kids ask her about her dad?” she wondered. 

But Bianca knew diverse families were more common today than they were yesterday. And, if she wanted to do this, she didn’t have time to ponder or wonder for long. 

Tick-tock.  

She was acutely aware of her biological clock. At 40 years old, she didn’t even know if she could get pregnant. 

Dr Raelia Lew, a Fertility Specialist at Melbourne IVF, tells Mamamia: "Egg quality and fertility options decline dramatically with advancing age. This decline starts from 30 years onwards, and is increasingly evident in IVF outcomes for women aged over 35 years."

Bianca knew, "It’s now or never. I have to at least try."

So she began the donor sperm process. 

“Two weeks before treatment started I had access to the general registry where there was about 60 donors for me to choose from.”

It was surreal, leafing through the pages in the way she might leaf through a brochure for furniture. Except this time, she might be lucky enough to create an entirely new life, depending on which one she chose.

For each donor, there was all the information she could ever want to know: ethnicity, religion, skin colour, hair colour, marital status, education level, occupation, number of children, reasons for becoming a donor, medical history, family’s medical history. 

“It’s very comprehensive,” she remembers. 

Bianca’s criteria were relatively narrow. She wanted someone tall, smart and with good health. So she selected her preferred donor and the IVF rounds began. 

It was months of having injections at 6am, going to work at 9am, and then finding out – in the office toilets, under the fluorescent lights – it hadn’t worked.

But after the heartbreak, came her greatest joy. Within 12 months she was at her six-week ultrasound, hearing the heartbeat of her first child. 

“When you hear the heartbeat it’s like the world stops for a moment,” she remembers. “But then you start to panic. Is my baby going to be okay? Is there anything wrong with my baby? Will I get to full term?”

“I just had a lot of anxiety around waking up every day and thinking, ‘is she still alive?’ My biggest fear was losing her.”

In May last year, in the midst of the pandemic, the 41-year-old welcomed her daughter, Ava. 

Bianca welcomed her daughter, Ava, in May last year. Image: Supplied.  

“It was the biggest relief to see her and hear her little cry,” Bianca remembers. 

Since welcoming her baby, Bianca has lived with her parents to help, and she’s put her career on hold until her daughter goes to school. 

“At the moment, I have no desire to go back to work and the only means of financial assistance I have is Centrelink. So it's not much, but we can live on that. I would much rather spend every moment I can with her until she goes to school…

“I went through too much to have her. At this age I just want to enjoy being a mum.”

Since becoming a single mother, she has watched friends and family also become single parents – but not by choice. 

“There's lots of failed relationships and broken marriages where children are torn between parents. I'm glad I don't have that. I have full control over my baby and the way we live our lives.”

Bianca does have one regret though. And that’s not doing it earlier. 

“You always think you’ll meet someone, you’ll be in a relationship, you’ll have a baby and they’ll grow up with two parents. 

“I believed that I needed a man to have a baby,” she laughs. “So I waited and waited and waited, hoping that I'd meet someone. And it just never happened. I wish I had done this when I was 30.”