The stork who brought little Roma Blum, two and a half years old, into the world, did not come from Paris. It came from the laboratory. Specifically, from the Sant Pau Hospital unit and the Puigvert Foundation. Her mother, Victoria Blum, 41, was 37 when she made the decision to have a baby alone. It took time and some headaches, but after four attempts at artificial insemination and two in vitro fertilizations (IVF), Rome arrived. The little girl is one of those thousand children who have been born in the last decade at the center thanks to a pioneering plan that Catalonia launched in 2016 to open the public assisted reproduction program to women without a male partner. Before that date, single women and lesbian couples who wanted to become mothers had to resort to private healthcare. “It is a very necessary service. I don’t know if I would have been able to take care of so many attempts in the private sector,” Blum now reflects.
