When Natasha and her husband had difficulty conceiving a child, doctors gave her two pieces of bad news. The first was that she would need to find a donor egg. The second was that Afro-Caribbean eggs are rarely donated. But she hasn't given up hope.
Natasha is 38 and is struggling to have a baby.
She got married in 2011 and started trying to conceive immediately. Eventually, it became clear there was a problem.
"I actually had four rounds of IVF treatment and obviously none of them were successful. And after the third round, the doctor said, 'We doubt that your eggs are going to be any good and you probably need to consider going down the egg donation route.' And she literally got up from her seat and said, 'I'll give you some time with your husband to discuss,' and she walked out the room. And that was it."
Natasha's next step was to call organizations that might help her obtain a donor egg. One was a donation bank.
"They basically said, 'We're going to have to be honest with you, but we don't have many black Afro-Caribbean egg donors come forward.' They told me straight and I appreciated the honesty rather than being sent on a goose chase."
Natasha then cast her net further afield. A clinic in Spain offered her an egg donated by an African. Many might think this was not a bad solution, but Natasha was not sure it would be right for her.
"My heritage is the Caribbean. My grandparents on both sides of the family are both from the Caribbean… it was important to me to at least have some cultural connection with the child, and I felt that if it was from a different heritage, I may not…"
She also felt that her family, which she says "has a big hang-up about who looks like who", might discriminate against a child that they knew had come from a donor.
In 2017, about 1,900 individual donors donated eggs in the UK. Of these only 15 were categorised as "Black Caribbean". Twenty were Black African. The vast majority - 1,608 - were White.
As Black Caribbeans make up 1.1% of the population according to the 2011 census, you might expect 21 out of the 1,900 donors to have come from this group. Black Africans, meanwhile, make up 1.8%, so if 2017's donor eggs had been evenly distributed by race, there would have been 34.
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