I hadn't realised how much anxiety and uncertainty I felt around my fertility

TV PRESENTER ANNA WILLIAMSON TELLS LISA SALMON ABOUT BECOMING A ‘GERIATRIC MOTHER’ AND WHY SHE WANTED A FERTILITY MOT

- 

TV presenter Anna Williamson always wanted to have kids but found herself “unexpectedly single” in her early 30s - and looked into egg freezing.

As luck would have it, she met her husband-to-be and got pregnant naturally before she could complete the process, but she went on to have fertility tests after her first child was born, in the hope that they wouldn't struggle to have another.

“Fertility is something I explored,” explains the now mother-of-two, who suffered perinatal anxiety and postnatal depression during and after her first pregnancy. “I wanted to feel more in control of my fertility choices, understanding where I was when it came to my fertility.”

Anna, who was classed as a ‘geriatric mother’ when she had her first child, Vincenzo, at the age of 36, was worried her fertility might be declining because of her age, so she went to a fertility clinic and had her AMH levels (a hormonal marker of how many eggs a woman has left in her ovaries) tested, as well as an internal examination.

“I was an older mum when I got pregnant,’ she says (she’s now 44), “and I've had several fertility tests as a bit of a fertility MoT.

“I hadn't realised how much anxiety and uncertainty I felt around my fertility because the headlines about it when you get older just scaremonger. I was also carrying around a worry that with the vaginal birth I had, which was a forceps delivery and quite traumatic, I'd sustained internal damage.