It's hard to meet the future father of your children when you can't date, can't go to a bar, can't go to a nightclub, can't go to the office and generally just spend all day, every day at home.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been incredibly hard and devastating on all of us. However, for women dreaming of becoming mothers and starting a family, and can feel the clock ticking, it might have felt especially long. Unable to date and meet people as you would under more normal circumstances, many have been faced with the pressure of time ticking by, and their fertility possibly declining before their very eyes. And so they are turning to other methods to ensure they can still have a baby some day – even if the pandemic means they won't get to meet a potential baby daddy just yet. According to Irish fertility clinics, an increasing number of single women have turned to egg freezing during the pandemic as they reassess their plans for a family and plan for their post-pandemic future.

In fact, Irish fertility clinics have reported year-on-year growth in the number of people wanting to freeze their eggs but said that the “Covid factor” had led to more women undergoing the procedure in the past 12 months.

The trend can be seen internationally as well. Speaking to NBC News earlier this year, Dr Fahimeh Sasan, founding physician at Kindbody, a US-based chain of egg freezing clinics, explains that the pandemic has created something of a boom when it comes to fertility preservation procedures.

“We quadrupled our revenue in the past year and tripled our number of clinics,” Sasan reveals, adding that the number of monthly egg retrievals in New York alone has tripled in the past year.