Radio 4’s Emma: I’m expecting baby No 2 after final shot at IV F

WOMAN’S Hour presenter Emma Barnett is expecting her second child, after undergoing gruelling fertility treatment and during which she suffered a devastating miscarriage.

The 37-year-old gave birth to her son four years ago after a single round of IVF, but five further attempts to have another baby failed. Yesterday she revealed the happy news that she and her husband are expecting another child after a sixth and final round of treatment.

‘All being well, early next year, my husband and I hope to have a baby,’ she wrote. ‘We are expecting to. And trying to believe this will, might, could, happen. Six rounds of IVF, one miscarriage and two-and-a-half years later, this is where we find ourselves.’

She added: ‘In some ways, it is eerily ironic that this round worked, as it was genuinely the last time we were going to try.’

In her blog, entitled Trying With Emma Barnett, the presenter and journalist has been candid about her experience of trying to conceive.

She writes of the cycle of ‘injecting, endless early-morning blood tests, egg retrieval, embryo transfers and then the negative pregnancy test result hitting you in the face – all while keeping down a job and trying to manage the toll it takes on your relationships’.

Ms Barnett was diagnosed with endometriosis – a painful condition that causes tissue similar to the lining of the womb to grow in other places, including the ovaries – six years ago.

The former BBC Newsnight presenter revealed her ‘socially awkward’ responses when people congratulate her on becoming pregnant: ‘I remember telling one of my bosses at the BBC last time around that I was expecting, with the follow-up line: “But let’s see, eh? We don’t know if this baby will make it. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

‘His ashen face will live long in the memory. But I meant it.’

In her blog, she writes of wanting to share ‘the horror of infertility contemporaneously while trying to conceive my second child’ to help other women in a similar position.

The success of IVF has increased in every age band over the past 30 years. Birth rates are at 32 per cent for under-35s but just four per cent for women over 44, according to NHS data.

Earlier this year, Ms Barnett spoke of the pain of continuing with IVF. ‘I used to read stories of women who had been able to endure six, seven or eight rounds of IVF and think, “How on earth could they keep going?”’

‘It was genuinely the last time we would try’