There is very little that’s fair about fertility.
Whether you are able to get pregnant, stay pregnant and bear children can often feel like a lottery. Or, perhaps more accurately, a gauntlet. Does your body have the organs needed, in the specific shape and with the appropriate quantity of cells? Do you produce the requisite hormones, in the right quantities, at the right time? Have you found someone else with the corresponding organs and cells to make a baby? And do they want to? Is your mental health robust enough to withstand the rigours and uncertainty of creating and raising a child? Did your window of opportunity close without you realising or, due to accident, illness or genetics, never fully open?
As I say, there’s nothing particularly fair about fertility. And yet, the current system in the UK has baked in several other injustices that I am always surprised don’t get more criticism. The main one being that single people, or same-sex couples do not receive fertility treatment on the NHS on the same terms that heterosexual couples do. According to a new report by the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority, one in six of all private and NHS fertility treatments in the UK is now accessed by single women and female same-sex couples. That’s a lot of single women and lesbians paying tens of thousands of pounds in the hope of getting pregnant that straight people might not have to.
Of course, plenty of straight couples also have to use private fertility treatment – at great cost and fairly heinous upheaval – I would never wish to diminish that. But the fact that you are excluded from free treatment simply because you don’t have a boyfriend strikes me as extremely unfair. That someone in your relationship does or doesn’t have a penis doesn’t feel like it should be a matter of £5,000 (the average cost of IVF in the UK undertaken privately). I have known competent, loving, financially secure women, with close families, their own home and even experience of birth and maternity care who have not qualified for IVF on the NHS simply because they were single. And I have known hapless, incompetent women with very little financial security who have got spontaneously pregnant within weeks of trying (yes, I’m talking about myself here).
It’s an injustice. And I imagine it’s hard not to feel that injustice personally, sometimes, when you’re getting the raw end of the deal. The BBC reports that the NHS now pays for just 27 per cent of IVF cycles, meaning that NHS funding for fertility treatments is falling (in 2012 it funded 40 per cent). As someone who firmly and passionately believes in public services over private business, this concerns me.
