Struggling with infertility, why so many women are going to psychics and tarot readers to fulfil their baby dreams

Lynsey Bleakly had been trying to conceive for two years when, aged 39 and aware she was running out of time, she visited an acupuncturist who specialised in treating fertility problems.

‘The longer it didn’t happen, the more anxious I became,’ says Lynsey, now 47, who tearfully told the £90-an-hour therapist her story. But the acupuncturist seemed unperturbed by Lynsey’s history. ‘She said she’d got lots of women pregnant, and it would be me next.’

It was a bold claim. Research shows that the benefits of acupuncture on fertility are unclear — as Lynsey, who went on to have four miscarriages, and, seven years on, has finally given up on the baby she longed for, is painfully aware.

‘I was given false platitudes. In the cold light of day, someone telling you they’ll pop needles in your skin and you’ll get pregnant is ridiculous, but when you’re desperate, you get sucked in,’ she says.

‘It is unspeakably cruel to take advantage of someone as vulnerable as I was and promise them something so fundamental as a baby.’

The fertility industry is booming — it’s predicted to be worth £33 billion globally by 2026, an increase of £13 billion from 2019 — but despite advances in science, many couples trying to conceive will spend thousands in vain. 

A 40-year-old woman — and the average age of women undergoing treatment is increasing — typically has just a 13 per cent chance of becoming pregnant after one cycle of IVF.

And fertility ‘experts’ working in alternative medicine are cashing in, offering therapies such as acupuncture, which proponents claim can boost blood flow to the uterus and improve ovarian function, increasing chances of conception. 

But the evidence is conflicting and non-conclusive and, according to the UK’s regulator HFEA (the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority), the benefits are ‘unclear.’

‘There is a place for complementary therapies to support fertility treatment. Anything that can help to reduce stress is beneficial. There is some evidence to support the use of acupuncture in IVF,’ says Kate Davies, an independent fertility nurse consultant and director of advisory clinic Your Fertility Journey.

‘But as a standalone treatment, it’s not going to be responsible for an individual achieving pregnancy.’

However, Lynsey, then a health visitor, who met her husband James at 35 and started trying for a baby two years later after they married, was advised by a midwife colleague to see a fertility acupuncturist after two years of failing to get pregnant.

Lynsey, who has a daughter, 23, from a previous relationship, had enjoyed acupuncture for relaxation before, so hoped it might help. But as soon as she walked into the clinic near her Belfast home, she felt the acupuncturist had ‘an agenda’.

Not only did she make what seemed to be baseless assertions that she would help Lynsey conceive, but she also urged her to make repeat bookings and suggested she try home vaginal steaming – a practice sold ostensibly to rebalance hormones, but that could be dangerous to a foetus in pregnancy.

‘It felt like a moneymaking exercise, that she was preying on my vulnerability.’ Over the next two years, Lynsey had four miscarriages, which she describes, in tears, as shattering: ‘I didn’t just lose my pregnancies — I lost my future.’

In 2018, she and James, 45, who channelled their grief into launching cake-making business Bumble & Goose Bespoke Bakehouse, investigated IVF for their infertility, to be told they stood just a 15 per cent chance of success. ‘In other words, there was an 85 per cent chance it wouldn’t work,’ says Lynsey.

‘Doctors are factual. They don’t promise you anything, and that is the way it needs to be.’

But for every doctor laying out the bare facts based on evidence, there’s an unqualified person willing to promise the Earth, and their voices are amplified by social media.

As any woman who has ever looked at an Instagram post about trying to conceive and then been served hundreds of adverts for fertility ‘solutions’ will know, for unscrupulous individuals wanting to target women when they’re at their most susceptible, the algorithms are a dream.

But, as Kate Davies points out, anyone can set themselves up as an authority. ‘There are unregulated individuals with little or no experience, selling themselves as so-called fertility experts. 

‘I fail to understand how anyone apart from a fertility clinic can state their intervention has helped someone get pregnant. I’ve had women coming to me with health anxiety as a result of seeing an unqualified practitioner. It is so damaging.’

While the efficacy of acupuncture might be debated, few could defend the claims of spiritual practitioners such as ‘fertility psychics’, who say they are able to tell women whether they will get pregnant, and even what gender their baby will be.

They include Gemma Martin, a mother of one from Dundee who, in 2022, claimed to be making £10,000 a month from tarot card readings, with an 85 per cent accuracy rate.

‘I predict when people will have a baby and most of the time it’s spot on,’ she said.

But when a psychic’s predictions aren’t ‘spot on’, the impact can be devastating, as Amanda Duddridge, 38, a teaching assistant from Pontypridd, South Wales, discovered.

When Amanda fell pregnant for a second time in 2017, she was anxious at the prospect of having a son, because several male members of her family have autism. Already a mother to Esmee, now ten, she visited three psychics to find out the sex of her unborn baby.

‘I became obsessed,’ says Amanda, who contacted a British psychic via her Facebook page when she was just five weeks pregnant.

The psychic said that, for £20, she could predict the gender, using only Amanda’s date of birth and the date of her last period — a claim that will sound fantastical to most.

But to a woman whose body was awash with hormones and who was desperately concerned for the health of her unborn child, it seemed a lifeline.

‘Two or three days later she emailed me that I was having a girl. I was so happy.’

Emboldened, Amanda emailed a second psychic, an American woman praised on an internet forum for having a 90 per cent accuracy rate, for further reassurance. Two days after making a £20 payment and supplying the same information as before, she received an email to say she was having a boy. 

‘I was so upset,’ says Amanda, whose partner of 12 years, a customer service adviser, 39, thought the psychic readings were ‘nonsense’ and that Amanda was causing herself unnecessary upset.

She didn’t tell him about her third psychic appointment, this time in person, with someone recommended on a local Facebook group, whom she desperately hoped would tell her she was having a girl.

The psychic was in her 50s, with black wavy hair, and was burning incense as she ushered Amanda into her home and took her £25 payment in cash. Using tarot cards, the psychic told Amanda, three times, that she was having a boy: ‘I was so disappointed.’

At 11 weeks pregnant, she started bleeding as she picked Esmee up from school and miscarried. This not only left her heartbroken, but wracked with guilt: ‘I thought I’d miscarried because I was having a baby boy and he didn’t feel I wanted him.’

Amanda became pregnant the following year and gave birth to her younger daughter, Elvie, in February 2019. She is now pregnant with her third child.

With hindsight, she regrets using psychics. ‘They caused a lot of stress. You hear what you want to hear and so many desperate women use them. It’s easy money.’

‘Desperate’ is a word that comes up a lot when talking to women about their challenges with fertility, and this desperation turns even the most logical woman into someone ripe for exploitation, as Catriona Lee, a lawyer based in London, explains.

‘When you’re vulnerable, you latch on to any scrap of promise, however illogical.’ That was how, in her mid-40s and after years of unsuccessful IVF treatment, Catriona found herself agreeing when a friend recommended a session with an astrologist.

‘I thought it would be a bit of fun,’ she says. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but I suppose I hoped they would tell me they could see motherhood in my stars, or something similar. When you’re struggling with infertility, you’re desperate for any hope.’

The reading started promisingly enough when the astrologer talked about some emotional pain that Catriona had experienced.

‘I told her about a miscarriage I’d had a couple of years before, but what happened next floored me. She told me I had to apologise to the baby I’d lost, tell them I was sorry I hadn’t been ready to welcome them into the world, and to let them know I was now ready. 

‘I was so shocked I just stumbled through the rest of the session before rushing off and crying in the loo, devastated at the thought that the miscarriage had been my fault. Much as I tried to dismiss it from my mind, in my emotional state I couldn’t and her words haunted me.’

Several years later, Catriona says she is ‘trying to come to terms with my childlessness. I still can’t believe someone could be so cruel to a grieving woman. These things stay with you — and I know I’m not the only one.

‘A friend of a friend went to see an acupuncturist when she was struggling to have children. He told her it was no wonder she kept having miscarriages as her body was so toxic. She subsequently went on to have two children, but those words preyed on her mind for a really long time.’

It’s perhaps unsurprising that women grappling with their fertility prove to be such a rich seam for psychics and the like to mine. 

Frustrated by the lack of concrete answers, the baffling statistics that have relevance only when you’re on the right side of them, and the huge amount of uncertainty surrounding the process, it’s little wonder that so many look for something, anything, to hang their hopes on.

After being diagnosed with ovarian cancer aged 33 and having her ovaries removed aged 35, Sunita Thind was plunged into surgical menopause.

Before she lost her ovaries, she’d had eight eggs harvested and frozen, and doctors told her there was a chance those eggs could be fertilised and implanted, if Sunita took hormones to thicken the lining of her womb.

‘Losing my fertility broke me,’ says Sunita, 41, from Derby, married to Paul, 47, an engineer. ‘But I still felt a flicker of hope and I was desperate for answers.’

She came across an advert online for a psychic phone line last autumn. The woman who answered the premium rate, 45p-a-minute number, sounded in her 50s, Sunita estimates. 

‘I told her I’d lost both my ovaries after cancer and wanted to know if I could still have a baby. She asked my date of birth, my star sign and where I lived. She said she read “auras” and that I had to have an open mind in order for her reading to work, especially over the telephone.’

She told Sunita she saw the number eight — the number of eggs Sunita had frozen — in her future, which gave her hope she was telling the truth when she also said she saw her having a child. ‘She said the journey was going to be hard. I pressed her for more but she couldn’t elaborate.’

Nonetheless, Sunita was ‘filled with a lovely feeling of hope. I’d been too scared to fantasise about having a child before’.

Still too traumatised from cancer therapy to have the hormone treatment she’d need to thicken her womb lining, or to go through the process of having her eggs fertilised, Sunita is no closer to becoming a mother.

Only time will tell whether the hope borne of a £15 conversation with a stranger is justified or whether, like countless other women, seeking solace in unproven fertility ‘experts’ will exacerbate, rather than alleviate, her sadness.

• Some names have been changed.