Jayne Torvill’s ‘difficult’ fertility battle before turning to adoption in her 40s

Dancing on Ice stars Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are often quizzed about their personal relationship when they’re not performing together on the ice, but off-screen, they are both in happy relationships with families.

In Jayne’s case, her journey to motherhood was not an easy one. She shares adopted children Kieran, 22, and Jessica, 18, with her husband, American sound engineer Phil Christensen, whom she married on 21 September 1990.

Former Olympic skater Jayne kept her family life very private for years, but a decade ago, she revealed she had quietly suffered an ectopic pregnancy before enduring 12 months of IVF treatment and turning to adoption.

‘Perfect’ adoption

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During an appearance on Lorraine in 2014, she admitted she was “naive” about her fertility in her 40s but was determined to reassure others that age shouldn’t stop you from adopting.

“I was a bit naive leaving it late to start a family obviously because I had a career,” she began.

“I did have lots of problems, I went through IVF several times. My story is a difficult one but I know some people have much worse experiences than I have and they’ve gone through so many different cycles of IVF. I did about four or five and that was enough for me,” she added.

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Opening up about the adoption process, Jayne said: “My story was a really good one. We had lots of help and support… it’s a long process. They really look into your background and what’s going to happen in the future, and at the time it can be really hard, but they have to do that. The outcome for me was perfect.”

She first adopted Kieran when he was aged eight months old. Recalling their special connection when they met for the first time with his foster mother, she said: “The first time I met Kieran it was that moment thinking, ‘This is going to be my child potentially.’ You want to grab them but you hold back.

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“I stood there and he was with his foster mum and he actually reached out to me.”

She finished by stating she wanted to encourage others to adopt. “I was in my 40s when I started the process and people think, ‘I can’t adopt, I’m too old.'”

Tearful first comments

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This came one year after she opened up about her IVF journey for the first time on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2013.

“As a couple skating together, it’s easy for the guy to go off and start a family because it wouldn’t affect his skating,” she said. “Whereas for me, it would have stopped what we were doing, so I left it quite late and I was into my forties by then.”

She continued: “I got pregnant quite quickly and I thought, ‘Oh this is fine’. And when I went to have a scan they said I had an ectopic pregnancy, and I didn’t know what that meant.

“They said, ‘The embryo’s growing in one of the tubes’. And I said, ‘Oh, ok, so how do you get it out then?’. And they said, ‘We don’t. We can’t’. That’s when it hit me.

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“So I went through the surgery and then it was obvious it was going to be more difficult. So we tried IVF for about a year. That, as a lot of women know, is traumatic in itself.”

As Jayne fought back the tears, her skating partner Christopher said, “She’s never talked about it in public before.”

Jayne revealed it was a friend who helped encourage her to try adopting.

“A friend of mine had adopted a little boy. She said, ‘Come and see him.’ At that point I wasn’t ready to look into adoption, I was still thinking it was going to happen.

“And you’ve got to be ready for it, if you want to adopt. I said to my husband, ‘I don’t know if I can do this’. And I went to see this little boy, and I wanted to bring him home.”