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Woman Made Allergic To Her Husband's Sperm In Order To Get Pregnant

Woman Made Allergic To Her Husband's Sperm In Order To Get Pregnant

The mother had previously had four miscarriages

Jake Massey

Jake Massey

You wouldn't think an allergy to something could have any benefits, but for Kathryn Berrisford, being made allergic to her husband's sperm is what gave her the two children she has today.

When Kathryn and her now-husband Joss, from Derbyshire, UK, first decided to try and have a baby, she was 31 years of age and she fell pregnant almost immediately. However, she miscarried, and over the next year and a half she miscarried a further three times.

The NHS carried out numerous tests as doctors attempted to identify what was going wrong, but the results provided no explanation.

Speaking to the Independent in 2012, Kathryn said: "By this stage, I was getting desperate.

"The doctors said there was nothing else they could do - they just told me to keep trying and that one day, hopefully I would have a pregnancy that worked out."

However, working in a fertility clinic, she decided not to heed this advice, instead asking her colleagues if they could carry out some further tests. Sure enough, a reproductive immunology specialist was able to carry out a simple blood test which revealed that the miscarriages were not down to bad luck - rather, Kathryn and her partner were tissue type matched.

Mrs Berrisford was eventually able to have babies with her partner thanks to an unusual treatment.
PA

Speaking to the BBC, she said: "They were looking to see whether we were tissue type matched, and it came back as yes, yes we were.

"My body wasn't seeing the sperm part of the embryo as foreign and the pregnancy wasn't being nurtured. "

As such, it was decided that she should receive leucocyte immune therapy, whereby she was injected with her partner's white blood cells, causing an allergic reaction, which would subsequently cause her body to recognise the cells as foreign.

Sure enough, the treatment worked, and Kathryn was pregnant once again. But this time it lasted the whole term, and baby Mae was born in 2005.

Kathryn said: "Joss had his blood taken, they spun his blood in the lab, got the white blood cells, they injected the white blood cells into my arm, and therefore the next time the sperm and the egg came together, my body saw that embryo as foreign and the pregnancy process kicked in."

She went on to have a second baby, Luke, 13 months later following the same procedure.

Speaking to the Independent, she said: "It was the most amazing feeling in my life, to think that you will never have a child and then to get two.

"When I watch the two of them playing together, I can't believe that we got everything that we wanted."

Kathryn is now trying to raise awareness of the extremely rare cause of miscarriage in order to help other prospective parents.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: Pregnancy, Science, Interesting, Relationships, Community, Health