A woman has revealed how she inseminated herself with a £25 DIY sperm kit after being celibate for 11 years.
Philosophy student Verity Jones, 35, obtained sperm online in December 2011, and gave birth the following September to a baby girl named Holly.
She said she gave up sex and relationships by accident, but doesn’t miss either, which is why she decide to turn to the do-it-yourself approach.
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Jones, from Ramsgate in Kent, said: "I had a bizarre dream about me being pregnant with a baby, it must've just been my biology telling me to hurry up.
"But I couldn't just go and have a baby with a random guy. So I organised a sperm donor online and inseminated myself.
"People with a lot of money go through doctors and things but I just signed some papers. He delivered his sperm in a donation pot and by some miracle it worked first time.
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"We still talk every year on my daughter's birthday. It's worked out bizarrely well."
She was given the donation free of charge, but just had to pay £25 for the travel costs.
Her daughter, who is now 10, knows about what happened, with Jones saying her daughter hopes it can ‘always be the two of them’.
Jones said she ‘thoroughly enjoyed sex’ before being celibate, but decided to give it up after too much ‘non-committed fun’.
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She continued: "It just kind of happened by accident 11 years ago when I was 24. One day I just thought, 'What's the point in this?'.
"I'm pansexual, so I'd mostly been with women - but some men too. I enjoyed sex a lot before that - it wasn't like I wasn't having it or committed to God.
"One day I just thought what's the point in this, maybe it was an early mid-life crisis but I was just fed up of non-committed fun."
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She says she now ‘hates the idea of being with someone romantically’, saying she is ‘completely celibate in every way – physically and emotionally’.
"When I chose to have my daughter alone I chose to purposely not have another parent involved,” Jones said. "I'm cynical of relationships.
"I don't believe in true love after hearing so many awful stories and I'd rather her have one parent than be parenting by a broken relationship.
"Being celibate means I can focus on myself rather than thinking about whether I'm pleasing someone else or feeling inferior or worrying I'm not all the things a partner would want.
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"If I like things a certain way then that's all that matters."
She said her own mum continues to try and encourage her to find someone, and that, while friends tend to understand her sexual celibacy, often struggle to understand why she doesn’t want an emotional connection.
"People do find it bizarre,” Jones said.
"If I post about it on Facebook I get lots of shock faces and people asking, 'How could that happen? You're only 35 and already been celibate for eleven years?'.
"People can usually understand the casual sex, but they don't quite understand the relationship aspect or get why I can be happy.
"They think I need a partner to be happy.”
She joked that she can ‘barely share the bed’ with her cat, let alone another person, adding: "Of course there are times I feel sad that I probably won't ever have sex again, and if I do I'll be like 60 and past the age of feeling like an attractive woman.
"It's not as if I don't have desires. I'm not asexual or a robot, I'm a woman and see Johnny Depp in the same way anyone else does - but it only lasts a minute and I move on.
"I'd definitely recommend this to others. Instead of crying because I've been cheated on I'm sitting peacefully at home with my cats."