You’re big business now, baby

All the way through those years, I had to keep hoping it would happen, because the alternative not having children was too scary for us to contemplate, she says. I would go in to have embryos implanted and would just stare at the slide on the microscope, looking at the little mass of cells and thinking that might be my baby. But each time the embryo wouldnt implant, I wouldnt get pregnant and we would go through another grieving process.

There would be people at work having baby showers or wed be going to christening parties, and it can be hard to smile, but you dont want to tell everyone what you are going through because its such a roller coaster. It is a very emotional, very private journey.

One in six couples in the UK has problems conceiving. The medical fertility industry clinics offering IVF, donor insemination and other treatments was worth an estimated 500 million at the last count in 2008. Unofficially, experts believe it is now worth well in excess of 600 million.

The demand for fertility services has never been so high. New analysis by the Office for National Statistics published last week showed that women now wait on average five years longer to have their first child than their mothers generation a key factor fuelling the growing dependency on IVF. The increasing age at which women contemplate motherhood, coupled with the rise in single women and gay couples seeking treatment, is helping to fuel demand for the fertility sector.

Add in the huge commercial market in supplements, alternative remedies, counselling, coaching and other products, and some analysts put the burgeoning fertility industry at worth more than 1 billion.

More than 3,000 visitors are expected at the sixth annual Fertility Show at Londons Olympia next month, where clinics, doctors and alternative therapists will showcase their services. Set up in 2009 by events organiser Jonathan Scott after a close relative had to endure IVF treatment, the Fertility Show has been an unexpected money-spinner. Visitor numbers have doubled in the past six years, while the number of exhibitors has risen from 80 to 140.

Scott says: When I first started the show, I thought it would be a one-off I never thought it would still be going, but the demand is there. It was incredibly controversial at the beginning. We had Jenni Murray from Womans Hour claiming it was all too commercial and awful. But its about giving people information on fertility and conception. Now it seems a lot more mainstream to be holding an event like this.

Claire Collins with husband Steve and 14 week old Ralph (David Rose/The Telegraph)

Since Louise Brown became the first IVF baby to be born in 1978, the number of women having fertility treatment and becoming pregnant as a result has soared, with a total of more than five million births globally. While the fundamentals of the science behind IVF havent changed dramatically in those three decades, the industry surrounding infertility and the pursuit of the perfect family certainly has.

According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), 47,422 women underwent fertility treatment at the 77 licensed clinics in the UK in 2012. But the course can still be ruinously expensive a single cycle can cost more than 8,000, and the majority, 60 per cent, are paid for privately by patients rather than by the NHS with hugely varying rates of success. HFEA figures suggest that for women aged 43 and 44, the average live-birth rate across all clinics in the UK is just 5.1 per cent.

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You're big business now, baby