A WOMAN who yesterday lost a court battle to use her frozen embryos to have a baby has made an emotional appeal for help to the one person on earth who can enable her to become a mother — her estranged former fiancé.

Natallie Evans, who was left infertile after cancer treatment, said that she was devastated that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had ruled that she cannot use embryos created in 2001 with Howard Johnston, then her fiancé, because he had since withdrawn his consent.

With time running out before the storage period of the six embryos expires in October, Ms Evans, 34, urged Mr Johnston to change his mind, emphasising that the embryos are her last chance of having a natural child of her own.

“Howard may feel that it is too late for him to change his mind, but it is not. Howard, please think about it,” she said.

She added that she would go along with any conditions he asked for, including allowing him to be actively involved with the child’s upbringing or not involved at all. She would do everything in her power, she has said, to assume full financial responsibility for the child, if that was what he wanted.

“I’ve tried every avenue with [Howard] to try to speak to his better nature. Nothing has helped. But I would just say, ‘Please think what you’re doing to me’,” she said.

Knowing that the embryos were in storage but that she could not have access to them was painful, she added.

“They’re stored in Bath, about 20 miles from where I live, and I’m thinking they’re there and I want them and there’s a law stopping me from having them and becoming the mother I so want to be.”

The court ruled by a majority of five to two against Ms Evans’s claim that British law, in allowing Mr Johnston to withdraw his consent for the embryos to be used, had interfered with her right to a private and family life under the Human Rights Act.

“The court did not accept that the . . . rights of the male donor would necessarily be less worthy of protection than those of the female; nor did it regard it as self-evident that the balance of interests would always tip decisively in favour of the female party,” it said.

The seven European judges also ruled unanimously that an embryo has no independent right to life and that Ms Evans had not been discriminated against for being infertile.

The couple started IVF treatment in 2001 after Ms Evans had ovarian cancer diagnosed. Six embryos were placed in storage before she underwent a successful operation to remove her ovaries.

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