Vicky Pattison opens up about brutal backlash for ‘messing with nature’ over egg-freezing treatment
‘God doesn’t want you to have children. Just accept it’, read one comment
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Your support makes all the difference.Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison has opened up about the brutal online backlash she experienced after sharing her egg-freezing journey on social media.
The 37-year-old said she had received hundreds of negative messages on her Instagram page, where the former winner of I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here has over 5 million followers.
Forced to quit social media as a result of the online hate, Pattison said she’d hoped her openness would help others feel less “ashamed”, but was instead subjected to a barrage of personal comments criticising her decision.
One such message read: “God doesn’t want you to have children. Just accept it.”
Pattison, who was “pumped full of synthetic hormones” at the time, told The Times, “I was feeling low. It was the last thing I needed.
“I had people saying I’m messing with nature. It’s unnatural what I’m doing, and if I haven’t found someone to have a baby with me maybe I should just give it up.”
In a series of unfiltered Instagram posts, the former Loose Women presenter uploaded footage of herself crying during the egg-freezing process, shared photos of her progress scans, and injected hormones into her stomach on camera.
“I wanted to show that we shouldn’t be ashamed of it — we should be proud,” she said. “There’s just so much misunderstanding and misinformation about the process.”
Egg-freezing treatment is an increasingly popular method used by women in their 30s to delay having children. Pattison took the decision to freeze her eggs after turning 35, saying she knew that “the viability of them seriously deterioriated” after that age.
She has been engaged to partner Ercan Ramadan, who is six years her junior, since 2019 and said she did not want to rush into having children before they were ready.
“Men mature later than women. He’s in his twenties, bless him, so asking him to be a dad when he really wasn’t ready – I felt that was pretty unfair and irresponsible,” Pattison told The Times.
The TV personality, who became patron of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics last year, previously shared her concerns around motherhood as a result of her upbringing and past experiences with alcohol.
In an emotive post on Mother’s Day, she shared an image of herself in hospital, along with pictures with other women in her life.
A caption to the post read: “Sending love to everyone today. I know for many it is a special day but I know for some it can be a painful reminder of what isn’t, what used to be and what we wish was...”
Last year, she gave evidence to the Parliamentary committee on Women and Equalities as part of an inquiry into women’s reproductive health, alongside BBC presenter Naga Munchetty.
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