Betty Mukherjee was 16 when she found out she was born without a womb.
Everyone around her had started their periods. Hers never came.
A GP visit led to a diagnosis of MRKH disorder, a rare condition that left her reproductive system underdeveloped.
She was told she would never carry a pregnancy.
She is now 28 and two rounds into IVF treatment, creating embryos that could one day be carried by a surrogate or implanted following a womb transplant.
The first round cost just under £13,000.
‘I carried a lot of quiet insecurity’
Mukherjee, who finished third on BBC One’s Race Across the World alongside her brother James, has spoken publicly about her condition before.
She was born with MRKH, also known as Rokitansky Syndrome, and has only one kidney.
Speaking to CreatorZine, she described how the diagnosis reshaped her adolescence.
“My first reaction was shock more than anything,” she said.
“I don’t think I fully processed it in that moment. But as I got older and started understanding what it meant for fertility, relationships and motherhood, that’s when the emotional side of it really began to hit.”
She pushes back on the assumption that MRKH is purely a fertility issue.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is that MRKH only affects fertility. In reality, it’s something that shapes quite a lot of how you grow up as a woman. Another misconception is that because you look completely normal, it must not be that big a deal, but invisible conditions can still carry a huge emotional weight.”
Two rounds, two healthy embryos so far
Mukherjee and her partner Dan, 32, completed their first IVF round in October 2025, producing two healthy, PGT-A tested embryos.
They finished their second round this month and are waiting on final numbers.
The target is five tested embryos, the threshold for acceptance onto a womb transplant programme.
The first cycle was funded privately. “It cost just shy of £13,000 once you factor in the medication, egg collection and embryo creation,” she said.
They were later approved for NHS funding for the second round, though additional genetic testing at £395 per embryo remains out of pocket.
“With IVF, success isn’t one single moment,” she said.
“There are lots of stages along the way. Right now the goal is to create healthy embryos, which would hopefully allow us to pursue surrogacy or a womb transplant in the future.”
Dating with MRKH
Before Dan, the condition made relationships harder.
Mukherjee described the conversation as one of the most vulnerable things she has had to navigate.
“You’re essentially sharing something very personal quite early on. Worrying how someone might react or whether it would change how they saw me carried a lot of fear,” she said.
“The right person will meet that conversation with compassion rather than judgment.”
Dan, she says, has been “incredibly supportive” throughout the fertility process.
‘They finally feel seen’
Speaking publicly has connected Mukherjee with women and girls who had never heard anyone discuss MRKH openly.
“I’ve had messages from girls who were diagnosed recently and felt completely alone, and others who had never heard someone talk openly about MRKH before. Many of them say the same thing: that they finally feel seen.”
She sees the visibility as part of a larger shift. “There are so many conditions like MRKH that people simply don’t know about until they affect them personally. The more we share our stories, the more we break down the shame and silence that often surrounds these topics.”
Why it matters
MRKH affects approximately 1 in 5,000 women. Most people have never heard of it.
Mukherjee’s platform, built through a primetime BBC show, gives her the ability to reach an audience that medical awareness campaigns rarely access.
Her willingness to detail the financial cost, the emotional toll and the clinical specifics of IVF treatment provides something genuinely useful to women facing the same diagnosis with no roadmap.
The £13,000 price tag for a single round of private IVF is a number that speaks to a wider problem in UK fertility care, but for Mukherjee it is personal.
She wants to be a mother. The science exists to make it possible.
The path to get there is expensive, uncertain and being documented in real time for anyone who needs to see that they are not the only one walking it.
