Sara Pascoe Urges Pride for Anyone Undergoing IVF Treatment

Sara Pascoe encourages pride for those undergoing IVF, sharing her personal journey and discussing how she incorporates fertility topics into her comedy.

Sara Pascoe Highlights Pride in IVF Journey

Sara Pascoe has expressed that anyone who attempts to conceive through in vitro fertilisation (IVF)

"should be so proud of themselves"

, emphasising that it is

"such a big thing to put your body through"

The 44-year-old comedian, who has openly discussed her fertility challenges in the past, conceived her two sons, born in 2022 and 2023, through IVF.

Discussing IVF in Comedy and Personal Life

In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Pascoe shared that incorporating IVF treatment into her stand-up comedy routines

"feels like a positive way to talk about something that people feel very isolated in"

Pascoe is recognised for her candidness regarding her personal experiences in her work. She has also detailed having an abortion at age 17 in her autobiography.

Regarding IVF treatment, she stated:

"It's such a big thing to put your body through. Anyone who does it should be so proud of themselves – and that's what I tried to do when I was talking about it more on stage."

However, she noted that when she and her husband, comedian Steen Raskopoulos, initially started trying for children via IVF,

"I couldn't do stand-up about it because it was far too raw."

She further explained that she only began discussing infertility after having children, describing it as a reflexive process. Pascoe added that she felt unable to approach the subject humorously until she knew the outcome.

She revealed it took until her eldest son Theo was eight months old before she felt prepared to address the topic in her comedy:

"It was really like: 'I definitely have a son. He survived. He's alive, he's here.'"

Pascoe expressed a desire to share her experiences with audiences at various stages of similar journeys:

"And I then felt I wanted to share things with people who I knew would be at different stages of it."

She also remarked on the nature of comedy, stating:

"The other thing with comedy is that people won't laugh unless they know you're OK. You can't tell them the stuff you're not OK about."

Openness About Personal History

Pascoe also discussed with Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne that her agent had advised against including an anecdote about her abortion in her 2016 book Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body.

She reflected on her approach to sharing personal details:

"I think the thing about me in the oversharing is that the sharing always feels like so much more important than any privacy."

"And actually, I'm not embarrassed. I've never really felt uncomfortable talking about a biographical detail."

Career Highlights

Sara Pascoe began performing stand-up comedy in 2007. She has appeared on television panel shows such as Have I Got News For You, QI, and Would I Lie to You.

She is also an accomplished author, having written three books. Among them is the novel Weirdo, which won the Jilly Cooper Prize for fiction in the previous year.