IVF for single women? Why don’t they just get a cat!

NO HUSBAND, partner or boyfriend? No significant other? No ‘ friends with benefits’? No problem, sister. You can still have that baby you always wanted and, in some cases, the NHS will even help provide it for you.

For a new generation of determined single women have decided that men are superfluous to their needs, and opted to have a baby on their own through IVF.

Figures released this week show the number of women in the UK trying to start a family without a father has leapt by a third in two years. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reports that 1,272 women in England alone registered to have fertility treatment without a partner in 2016 — up from 942 in 2014. And that figure itself doubled in the previous five years.

I’d like to say well done, ladies. I’d like to say you go, girl — it takes courage, commitment and fortitude to do what you have done. I’d like to say congratulations for taking control of your own life and being brave enough to go out there and get what you want; grabbing that elusive happiness and that gurgling kid with both hands.

I’d like to say all those things — but I just can’t. For deep in my soul I think it is selfish of women to deliberately deprive a child of a father just to satiate their own maternal needs, keenly felt as they might be.

To scrub Dad off the shopping list of family basics, to strike him out of the equation as if he were an unaffordable luxury, like a cashmere blanket for the crib or a shiny new tricycle? It is an emotional indulgence with far-reaching consequences, both for baby and for mum.

WHAT do you say ten years down the line, when junior wants to know about their father, when he or she is searching for a sense of self, an identity and an anchor? by saying, darling, genetic motherhood was something I just had to experience, and screw the consequences?

Children need fathers, dads are important. Of course relationships and marriages can end, while there sure are a lot of dud daddios out there who are a waste of ink on a birth certificate. Yet at least couples start out in hope and good heart, embarking on the great family adventure together without deliberate handicap. Single parents talk endlessly of the struggle of bringing up baby alone. To opt for this challenging life seems crazy.

These days it is not just careerists who seek a late solo baby, but also women who have simply failed to find Mr Right. Approaching 40, with their own Mr Darcy failing to stride out of the gene pool in a damp muslin shirt, they have decided to go their own way. And some of them expect the rest of us to pay.

NICE guidelines state that couples must have tried to have a baby by having unprotected sex for two years before they qualify for IVF on the NHS. Single women in need of a baby are required to have 12 cycles of artificial insemination before being eligible for NHS fertility treatment. That process costs around £10,000, and heaven knows how much emotional and hormonal heartbreak. Even after this, there is no guarantee they will then qualify for free treatment — but should the NHS be providing it in the first place?

For those who struggle to conceive, the expectation that the health service should provide fertility on demand is misplaced. The inability to have children must be heart-breaking, but it is not a disease. Resources are limited — and surely most taxpayers would prefer their money was spent instead on the care and treatment of those who are actually ill?

I read a newspaper story about Kate, a typical elective single mother. She had always been broody and was 40 years old when she had IVF on her own. Now she has a twoyearold daughter and everything is super-great. ‘It’s hard work, but I have no regrets,’ she said, adding that her parents paid £7,000 of her £9,000 IVF bill and she hit the baby jackpot first time.

Lovely for her, but if you are still borrowing from the bank of mum and dad at 40, it doesn’t say much about you as a responsible, independent adult. Kate also said it was ‘ hard work’ doing all the meals, etc, alone, but it was worth it because ‘I get all of the affection from my daughter, too’.

AND there we have it, right there. Yes, there are magnificent women who opt to be single mothers and who will raise incredible children who will go on to do good in the world. Yet it also seems that getting a baby at any cost, no matter what your circumstances, can be a substitute for something lacking in your life.

If all Kate wanted was to be loved and to bask in affection, couldn’t she just get herself a cat, as women once did? No second best for the me-first generation, I fear.