A couple who underwent IVF treatment after Facebook friends secretly crowdfunded to pay for the treatment have welcomed a baby girl.
Marisha Chaplin, 26, and her partner Jon Hibbs, 29, had their first daughter Evie following IVF treatment but could not afford another round.
So, unbeknown to the couple, a group of thoughtful mums on Facebook who had never met the pair raised £2,000 for the treatment.
Chaplin, who gave birth to Isla on Saturday, told the group as soon as she could despite being “pretty much out of it” from the Caesarean section, the BBC reported.
“It’s amazing, it really is. It’s better than we ever imagined and we didn’t think we would ever get to this point,” the mother-of-two told the BBC, adding that she is “so grateful” to those who had donated.
The couple met as teenagers in 2007 when Chaplin was undergoing cancer treatment and Hibbs came in for a check-up.
“I saw him and said to our Clic Sargent worker ‘I fancy him’ basically, and she said she could give him my MSN address,” Chaplin said.
The couple started using IVF donor eggs when Chaplin was 23, after trying to conceive naturally, and gave birth to Isla’s sister in 2016.
It was then that she joined a Facebook group for other mothers who had given birth at the same time, whose members raised the money and surprised them in a video played on Facebook Live.
The couple used frozen embryos left over from their previous IVF treatment.