Stewart & Lancaster’s Ivf Battle For New Baby

ROD STEWART and his expectant wife PENNY LANCASTER battled for two years to have another child before turning to “stressful” in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments in a bid to conceive.

The rocker’s wife is pregnant with the couple’s second child, which is due in March (11).

They already share four-year-old Alastair and were desperate to give him a younger sibling, but the pair had to turn to medics after Lancaster failed to fall pregnant naturally.

The couple battled through two courses of IVF before the model successfully conceived on the third attempt - and Lancaster was ecstatic when she heard the news.

She tells Hello! magazine, “I couldn’t believe it. I burst into tears. I called Rod when I was still sobbing. Rod said, ‘I’m in the middle of a restaurant in Russia, crying.’ I kept pinching myself. Neither of us could believe it.”

But despite their happiness, the Maggie May hitmaker admits the process was tough: “IVF can be stressful, especially for the woman with all the hormone injections and procedures. I said to Penny, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just keep trying.’”

The successful attempt came after Lancaster cut seafood from her diet after doctors warned her about her high mercury levels.

She explains, “A homeopathic doctor told me my mercury levels were really high, off the scale. I do love fish, and I thought it was healthy without understanding the high mercury levels that fish like tuna, swordfish and halibut can contain. My doctor said it was unhealthy to have so much mercury in my body, and also for conceiving babies.

“After two months of not eating fish, my mercury levels dropped by half, which is scary - I had no idea what the fish had been doing to my body.”