‘IVF was the only chance we had of having a family’

Mrs Roberts, now 66, says after years of trying to conceive, she discovered her fallopian tubes were blocked from when she had had appendicitis and then peritonitis.

“It was never going to happen naturally,” she says.

She was told by a doctor to try IVF and paid £2,000 for one round of private treatment at the Cambridgeshire facility, which was the world’s first IVF clinic when it opened in 1980.

“It was the only chance we had of having a family,” she says.

IVF is one technique to be able to have a baby. An egg, external is removed from the woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory.

The fertilised egg, called an embryo, is then returned to the woman’s womb to grow and develop.

In Mrs Roberts’ treatment, 22 eggs were retrieved, 13 were fertilised and three were put back, which led to the successful birth of her twin girls.