For 40 years, London Women’s Clinic and our family of brands – Kind iVF, London Egg Bank, London Sperm Bank and LWC Egg Freezing – have been at the forefront of fertility care, supporting individuals and couples on their paths to parenthood. With changes in UK law expanding fertility options in recent years, a new chapter in family-making is starting, and we’re here to help shape it.
The Familymakers Show is about recognising the progress made, celebrating the families created along the way, and looking ahead to what’s possible. This event brings together our community – past, present, and future – to ensure that every path to parenthood is supported and empowered.
Fertility treatment for the LGBTQIA+ community has been at the heart of the London Women’s Clinic’s mission throughout its 40-year history.
‘Raising Tomorrow’, our feature in this year’s Familymakers Show, is not about this past but about what we can do for the LGBTQIA+ community today, as they look ahead to their own family formations. What we see today – and tomorrow – is a range of treatments which were unimaginable 40 years ago, when we first opened our doors to fertility treatment for LGBTQIA+ patients. Over the decades, scientific developments have advanced hand- in-hand with regulatory changes, legal updates and social attitudes to make fertility and parenthood far more available and accessible to all. London Women’s Clinic has been at the heart of all of these positive changes.
Our sessions at the Familymakers Show will give an overview of the treatments available to LGBTQIA patients, exploring the patient journey and setting out the expected levels of success.
Some of those treatments, have been championed by London Women’s Clinic, including egg and sperm donation and egg freezing, where our work has been reported in scientific studies unmatched by any other UK clinic. London Sperm Bank and London Egg Bank now provide the UK’s premier source of domestically available gametes, and their development has been instrumental in expanding access to treatments for the LGBTQIA community.
Many same-sex female couples choose IVF as a means of ‘shared parenthood’, a technique pioneered by London Women’s Clinic in which one partner provides the egg and the other carries the pregnancy. As our network of clinics grows alongside the treatments we offer, pathways to parenthood for LGBTQIA people are growing – opening up new opportunities for the future.
More recently we introduced the UK’s most affordable IVF programme, Kind iVF, which has enabled greater access to this cornerstone of fertility treatment. Our south coast clinics are also approved to deliver NHS-funded treatment meaning patients with secured NHS funding can come to us to complete their families.
At a recent specialist medical meeting, our medical director, Professor Nick Macklon, described London Women’s Clinic as ‘the leading fertility centre for the LGBTQIA community in Britain’. The treatments and brands we present here are living evidence of that position.
