‘Everyone has a dad,’ I heard my son’s friend telling him the other day, ‘Nope: not me,’ was his response,” says Anne Patricia Rehlsdorph, 45, a lawyer from Copenhagen. “He’s seven now but he has known since he was two that he’s a donor baby and our ‘family’ is just me and him. Solo parenting can be hard, but it’s also fantastic. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Rehlsdorph is one of a growing tribe of elective single mothers or “solomor” in Denmark, where one in 10 babies conceived with donor sperm is born to a woman without a partner. “It’s a trend we’ve really seen growing since single women were offered free fertility treatment in 2007,” says Karin Erb, lab director at the fertility unit of Odense University hospital. Researchers collected the personal data of single women undergoing assisted reproduction at public and private clinics for the first time last year. “And, as Denmark has the highest number of births by assisted fertility treatment in the world, these solomor represent a significant number,” says Erb. “Everyone knows someone who’s a solomor or thinking of becoming one.” Sperm banks have also noticed a rise in demand from single, heterosexual women. “Around 50% of our clients are now single,” says Ole Schou, director of Cryos International, the world’s largest sperm bank in Aarhus, Jutland. “We’re seeing an avalanche of educated older women – 85% are aged between 31-45 and half have masters degrees or higher. More and more of them are going it alone and we predict that by 2020, 70% of our clients will be single.”

Read the article “‘There’s No Stigma’: Why So Many Danish Women are Opting to Become Single Mothers” on theguardian.com.