Doctors say women often don't want to wait for their ideal man

Four British firms known to have helped the women with £5,000 treatment

At least 25 straight women who've never had sex have given birth via IVF

No man necessary: The Mail on Sunday can reveal that dozens of women are giving birth thanks to IVF despite never having had sex or a boyfriend

Dozens of young heterosexual women have had virgin births after undergoing IVF in Britain, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Some are using the £5,000 fertility treatment to bypass the need to involve a man, and others so that they can save themselves for a ‘special relationship’.

Doctors said last night at least 25 straight women had given birth in the past five years despite being virgins. But campaigners for the traditional family said the ‘distorted’ move turned babies into little more than ‘teddy bears’ to be ‘picked off the shelf’.

Religious groups said it undermined the importance of bringing up children in a stable marriage, while a leading psychotherapist warned that having a mother who had never been in a relationship could harm a child’s development.

At least four major British IVF firms have helped heterosexual, virginal women conceive and become mothers, The Mail on Sunday has found.

One is Care Fertility, which runs five centres across England. Maha Ragunath, medical director of its clinic in Nottingham, said: ‘The number of single women I see has doubled over the last decade and single women now account for at least ten per cent of my patients.

‘A lot of them are very young, in their 20s, sometimes studying or doing very ordinary jobs and often living with their parents, rather than career women who have been driven and focused too much on their work.

'When I ask them why they are coming for treatment, very often the response is that they are ready to have a child and they don’t want to wait around for the right partner to come along.

‘A small percentage have never been in a relationship and never had sexual intercourse.

‘They are extremely happy to go ahead on their own and don’t care about the implications that might bring for the child or how they would go into a new relationship.’

Over the past three years, Miss Ragunath has treated three such single virgin women: one a nurse, another living at home with her parents, and a third who needed multiple rounds of IVF. All became mothers.

Heterosexual virgins will have paid for their own treatment, as NHS rules state women must ‘have been trying to get pregnant through regular unprotected sexual intercourse’ for two years before applying.

But the development has angered many. Josephine Quintavalle, of the group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: ‘What is the child for these women? A teddy bear that they pick off the shelf?

‘The message from nature is for a male and female to have a child, and I am saddened that we are willing to distort this. The diminished role of the father is not desirable for the child. Once you start down this route, where do you stop?’

But Laura Witjens, chief executive of the National Gamete Donation Trust, said: ‘These women have a right to choose this path if they want to, but clinics do have a responsibility to consider why they want do so.’

She said society tended to ‘freak out' when they heard about single women going for motherhood. But she said such women tended to be much better prepared financially, socially and emotionally, to be parents than those left as single mothers through a failed relationship.

Where it happens: Pictured is the Care Fertility Clinic in Nottingham, one of several centres which have helped impregnate women with no experience of sex or relationships

However, the Bishop of Carlisle, James Newcome, said any trend towards young women deciding they did not need a family to have a child would ‘have implications for society that would not be helpful’.

‘The ideal is that a child has a mother and a father who are married to each other. All the evidence shows that is the best context for a child,’ he said.

The revelation comes days after Pope Francis warned the family was threatened ‘perhaps as never before’, telling U.S. Congress: ‘Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.’

Imam Suhaib Hasan, head of Britain’s Islamic Sharia Council, accused IVF doctors of ‘acting like God’. He said: ‘When you remove a man from this, a woman becomes nothing but a breeding machine. Here, a woman is denying the child the right to have a father.’

Other IVF firms helping heterosexual virgin women to conceive include The London Women’s Clinic, Create Fertility, and the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre.

Tracey Sainsbury, a senior fertility counsellor and research officer at The London Women’s Clinic, said she saw about two single, heterosexual virgin women a year wanting to have a baby.

Playing God? Maha Ragunath helped three virgin births at the Care Fertility Clinic. They cannot be funded by the NHS

‘Every case is different,’ she explained. ‘Some have never had a relationship, others have been in a relationship but never had sexual intercourse, some are single lesbian women; for others there may be psychological or medical reasons why they have never had sex.

‘Some wish to save sexual intercourse for a special relationship. They feel they have not found the right partner to share sex with, but they know they want a baby now.

‘If they haven’t found that relationship by the point at which they want a baby, then I don’t see fertility treatment as an issue.

‘The same is true for single lesbians. I have not met a single woman hoping to conceive who has popped in to the clinic on a whim, or who hasn’t thought about the implications of their decisions for themselves, their wider family and most importantly for any child conceived. There is no uncertainty about their desire to parent.’

Professor Geeta Nargund, of Create Fertility, and Mohamed Taranissi, of the ARGC, said they too had helped virgin heterosexuals conceive, but they tended to be women with issues about sex who were in relationships.

‘This tends to be as a result of a physical or psycho-physical problem, although cultural and religious influences may sometimes be a factor,’ explained Prof Nargund, who said her clinic had seen about a dozen such couples since 2010.

‘In some cultures it is the stigma associated with childlessness which causes some women to head for fertility treatment rather than counselling for psychosexual issues.’

Dr Taranissi added: ‘It’s fear of sex. Most of them don’t have a fertility issue – it’s more a psychological problem.’

Child psychotherapist Dilys Daws said the fact that virgin women were resorting to IVF ‘suggests someone who is not emotionally mature enough to be close to someone else – and that matters when it comes to bringing up a child. It implies the woman has a fear of having a close physical relationship with someone else, in which case the baby will not be brought up with that love.’

Clinics stress that every woman must see a counsellor before treatment so they understand the process and the implications of using donor sperm. Children born this way have the right to trace their biological father once they reach 18. Clinics also say great importance is placed on the welfare of child.

But Gedis Grudzinskas, an experienced Harley Street infertility consultant, said it was essential doctors assessed ‘the circumstances into which a child would be born’ before agreeing to help a single, virginal woman get pregnant.

‘Just because money talks does not mean it’s the right thing to do,’ he said.