Online friends surprise fellow mum by raising funds for her IVF

A group of friends from an online parenting group, who have never met in real life, clubbed together to pay for one of the mums to have IVF treatment.

Marisha Chaplin and her partner Jon Hibbs are a couple who both individually survived childhood cancer. Hodgkin’s lymphoma and subsequent rounds of chemotherapy left the couple struggling to conceive a child. In May 2016, Marisha and Jon became parents after a successful IVF treatment using a donor egg, welcoming baby Evie into their lives. However, the couple were told it would cost £2,000 to pay for a further round to give little Evie a brother or sister - something that was financially out of reach for the pair. Tipperary mum Lainey Orgill, who now lives in Manchester, is one of the members of the May Babies 2016 Facebook group who decided to raise the money for their online friend themselves. Lainey and her fellow mums set up a secret fundraising group and then surprised Marisha with a video showing messages from the group telling her what they had done. Beca Evans, one of the secret fundraisers told HerFamily how the plan came about:

"Marisha and Jon both had cancer as teenagers and unfortunately Marisha's treatment left her infertile. They used an egg donor to have a baby in May 2016, but they were desperate for another baby. However, the embryos from the same donor are only kept for three years and they needed £2,000 for the IVF."

Last Sunday night, when Marisha thought she was going live on Facebook to promote some cosmetics that she sells, the group surprised her with a video message about the money they had raised for her treatment. Beca told HerFamily that it was a heartwarming moment for all of the mums involved:

"We made a secret group with all the other ladies in the may 2016 group and together - in the past seven months - we managed to get all the funds needed. There were 74 of us in total. We wrote a poem to reveal it to them and every member of the group held a sign up with a line from the poem on it. I put together the video and we managed to get Marisha and Jon live on camera so we could see their reactions when they watched the video. It was so heartwarming."