Nail technician Erin, who missed two years of work during her cancer treatment, also has to take on the significant costs involved.

“It’s also coming with a financial burden that if I choose to do this, it’s going to impact my near future

“It’s £8,000 to do this procedure that I’m going to need to fund myself.

“The way it works is you can have multiple cycles to get the best outcome, I will need two cycles to get the correct amount eggs.

“If I’d received it before the NHS would have funded it, but because now I’ve had cancer treatment they will not fund it.

“I’ve always worked really hard and thought I would be at a different point in life financially now.

“After being off work to be hit with a cost like this wasn’t even on my radar.

“It’s been a massive shock and the stress that came with it has been huge.”

Doctors have used ground-breaking surgery on an unborn baby to successfully correct a birth defect while he was still inside the womb.

His mother, Maisie Savage, from London, was operated on by doctors in the US while she was 26 weeks pregnant.

Baby Theo, who is now five months old and thriving, had gastroschisis, where the belly button does not develop properly, causing the intestines to grow externally.

Doctors partially exposed his mother’s womb and then gently pushed his organs back inside his abdomen using keyhole surgery.

He was the third baby in the world to benefit from the first-of-its-kind clinical trial.

Maisie, 29, and Theo’s father, Josh French, 36, both teachers, say they are incredibly relieved by the success of the pioneering surgery.

“He’s a little miracle, isn’t he?” Maisie told BBC News.

But they both know things could have been very different.

The serious birth defect affects one in 3,000 UK babies each year. In the best-case scenarios, babies can require weeks in intensive care and nutritional feeding through a tube or IV and corrective surgery.

For the most complex cases, like Theo’s, outcomes are far more serious with up to six months in neonatal intensive care, multiple surgeries, IV nutritional feeding for up to two years, and a possible intestinal transplant.

Even with the highest level of medical care, one in 10 babies will die.

She outlined existing provision for new parents, including the Healthy Babies programme which “supports new parents and families by offering integrated preventative and universal support, including perinatal mental health, parent-infant relationships and infant feeding in the 1,001 days from pregnancy to age two.”