FEW days pass when I don’t look down at my breasts and think: ‘What was the point of you?’

I’ll never get to use them for what nature intended: to feed a baby whose kicks I’d felt inside of me, or to have my newborn laid across them as we shared our first ‘hello’.

If I sound defeated, that’s because I am. After spending eight years and more than £70,000 riding the IVF roller coaster, I’ve finally stepped off it.

Forced, aged 47, for the sake of my sanity, to grudgingly accept that I will never carry my own baby to term.

I once thought I’d do anything before I’d admit that simple biological truth, even to myself. And yet, I have still found ways to feel complete as a woman. Alongside my sadness, I’ve come to value the strength I found deep within myself that allowed me to accept it wasn’t to be.

Jessica Hepburn, 47, (pictured) revealed how she came to peace with being unable to have her own child after eight years of trying IVF

Rather than ploughing steadfastly on with something that was taking a terrible toll on my body and my wellbeing, I was able to find peace with the situation and now work to help others have families instead. I’m proud of myself for that.

It’s true, I’ll never get to announce that I’m pregnant. I’ll never get to say: ‘I think my waters have broken,’ or yell out: ‘For God’s sake, someone pass the gas and air.’

The pain of so many ‘nevers’ is something I will live with for the rest of my life.

Because, after spending almost a decade absolutely believing that the next round of IVF would be the one that would finally make me a mother, I’m done.

I’m not normally a quitter, but this process has battered my self-esteem, put a strain on my relationship — and even endangered my life.

And, almost as an aside to the terrible emotional cost, there’s the debt my partner Peter and I accumulated. We re-mortgaged our home, maxed out credit cards and borrowed from the bank, as well as family and friends.

None of which would have mattered had I achieved the Holy Grail: a baby. But my arms remain empty.

I’d just turned 34 when Peter, a teacher, and I decided to try for a family in 2004. The fact that my fertility was about to set off on a downward trajectory — women’s ability to have a child declines from age 35 — didn’t occur to either of us.

It was only when trying went from being fun and intimate to mechanical and stressful that I began to think: ‘Why did we wait so long?’

But then, I’m of a generation raised to tick professional success off our to-do lists ahead of having children. Motherhood was somewhere on the agenda but, as I forged a career as the executive director of a London theatre company, it certainly wasn’t the dream.

Until, suddenly, it was. A dream that became such an obsession, my life spiralled out of control.

Jessica and her partner Peter tried to conceive naturally for a year before seeking medical help. She recalls becoming pregnant five times through IVF but later having the embryo die

Peter and I tried to conceive naturally for a year before we sought medical help and were given that most frustrating of non-answers: unexplained infertility. Friends’ pregnancies already caused twinges of pain, while seeing mothers pushing their prams tied strange knots in my throat.

And so, we decided to throw money at the problem. The first treatment was horrendous — artificial insemination with Peter’s sperm at a London clinic so busy that a doctor wanted to ‘whip it in’ while I lay on a trolley in a corridor.

It all seemed so chaotic, I became convinced they were going to inject another man’s sample by mistake. I left in tears, the treatment abandoned.

During the eight years that followed, I endured 11 rounds of IVF. It is talked about as a ‘miracle treatment’ but, in this country, only around 25 per cent of all cycles are successful.

Patients who actually end up with a baby typically spend five years — and many thousands of pounds — getting there.

Who knew the rate of IVF success would rise? More than a quarter of a million UK babies have been born via IVF. Its success rate has risen from 14 per cent in 1991 to 26.5 per cent Advertisement

I was unusually lucky, in that the hormones I was given to make me release more eggs didn’t cause side-effects. Harvesting them was done under general anaesthetic, so that didn’t cause me any discomfort, either.

But the trade-off was the relentless emotional pain. I was in limbo, constantly waiting for my ‘real’ life to start when the treatment worked.

And, all the while, I kept this a secret from colleagues, friends and even family. Perhaps I was afraid that if I told them, they’d see I was suffering and urge me to stop.

In all, some 70 potential babies, in their embryonic form, were either placed inside of me or frozen for later attempts. Every one was used up. I became pregnant five times — only to discover days, sometimes weeks, later that the embryo had died.

Perhaps if I’d never conceived, I would have been able to walk away sooner. But knowing that I could get pregnant convinced me carrying a baby to term had to be possible.

Jessica and Peter were able to hear the heart beat of one baby but later suffered a miscarriage at nine weeks

The strain meant Peter and I bickered constantly — the anger churning inside me would erupt like a bottle of pop.

Like so many men, his abiding refrain was: ‘Whatever you want.’ He wouldn’t give up until I called quits.

And yet, even when our fifth attempt caused a potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancy that saw me rushed into theatre for four hours of emergency surgery, I couldn’t do that.

Watching Peter pack his bags and move out a few months later because he needed a break from my ferocious mood swings — one of which saw me tip a bottle of wine over his head — wasn’t enough for me to cancel the next round of treatment.

I became pregnant again and, thankfully, Peter moved back in. That baby survived long enough for us to hear its heartbeat and marvel at a grainy outline on a scan. But it ended in miscarriage at nine weeks, leaving me feeling even more broken.

Still, I kept going. During our tenth cycle, my father passed away, aged 92. We got the news I wasn’t pregnant soon after.

I’d somehow convinced myself that natural justice would give me new life in exchange for taking my dad.

Jessica began searching for other avenues of fulfillment other than having a baby when her landmark birthday arrived

But, by now, I was starting to realise that justice didn’t enter into it. Ever hopeful, though, we gave it another try — our last.

Only then did I finally find the strength to give up. That might sound strange — we usually see fortitude in those who keep going in the face of adversity. But, for me, admitting I’d had enough was the hardest thing of all.

There was no one moment when I said: ‘No more.’

It was more a growing despair that ran parallel with an acceptance that time was moving on and maybe I should do the same — that there was more than one way this story could end. I’d always said that if I hadn’t had a baby by 43, then I’d give up. Biologically speaking, that’s when your fertility falls off a cliff. It became a line drawn in the sand — the point at which I could allow myself to get on with the rest of my life.

When that landmark birthday arrived, days after I learned yet another cycle had come to nothing, I allowed myself to consider that there might be other ways to feel the fulfilment having a baby had represented for so long.

I looked for something else that would feel extraordinary instead and ended up swimming the Channel — something I’d told my father I’d achieve one day, back when I was a little girl. I did it to raise money for families without children, and children without families.

It was a life-changing moment. I finally realised having a baby wasn’t the only astonishing thing my body was capable of.

Jessica (pictured) has become a fertility campaigner to give other women an awareness of what they should know before trying for a baby

That allowed another idea to grow: that motherhood, for me, might not look quite how I’d imagined it should.

That perhaps I could adopt or foster — both ideas I’d discounted because I was so hell-bent on carrying my own child.

Or even that I could live out the rest of my life and be happy enough without ever becoming a parent at all.

I won’t pretend that it doesn’t still hurt me to see a pregnant woman, or that the knowledge Peter and I will never see our features reflected back at us in another human being doesn’t tear at my heart.

But these difficult truths have become easier to live with. Now, as a fertility campaigner, I arm young women with the facts they need about when they should start trying for a baby — a mission that somehow softens my own sense of failure.

I’m not saying that women should go back to putting babies at the top of their to-do lists — but they do need to know their chances of motherhood fall the longer they wait.

I still have that scan picture of the baby I miscarried at nine weeks tucked away in a jewellery box, along with all my positive pregnancy tests.

Each time I look inside, I feel those losses all over again.

But, while that pain will never leave me completely, at least it’s become just one part of my story, instead of the thing that defines me.

Jessica Hepburn is the author of 21 Miles: Swimming In Search Of The Meaning Of Motherhood (out now, Unbound £14.99) and founder of Fertility Fest (Bush Theatre, May 8 to 13, fertilityfest.com).