Therapy helped her sit with the uncertainty of being part of a single-child family – and realise others’ successes with pregnancy were not her failures

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Anna* delighted in motherhood and was eager to add a second child to her family. She expected conception and pregnancy to again be quick and easy but, after a year of negative pregnancy tests, Anna’s doctor used a term she had not heard before: secondary infertility.

For Anna, the anguish associated with secondary infertility – the inability to conceive or carry to term a second or subsequent child – was pervading all aspects of her life. Anna believed her family to be incomplete without a second child and was devastated at the thought of her child growing up without a sibling.