No baby, no fee... Spanish IVF clinic’s controversial £26k deal
COUPLES who have difficulty conceiving are being offered controversial ‘ no baby, no fee’ deals by Spanish IVF clinics.
Patients who qualify hand over around £26,000 for three cycles of IVF with the guarantee that if they do not end up with a healthy baby they get their money back.
the treatment is offered to healthy women under 38 and applies to those needing egg donation or using their own.
Critics say the deals are further commercialising the birth process and are, in fact, poor value for money as the couples would pay less for individual rounds of IVF. In the UK prices vary widely but can be as low as £3,000 for a single round of the treatment.
IVI, one of the Spanish medical groups offering the deals, has a clinic in London as well as nine in Spanish holiday resorts including Malaga and Alicante.
Dr Elena Labarta, a gynaecologist from IVI, said many British patients were attracted to the clinics because egg donors retain their anonymity in Spain.
In England, children born from donated eggs can find out the identity of their biological mother at the age of 18, meaning there are fewer egg donors here. Dr Labarta said around 10 per cent of the clinic’s 4,000 patients a year come from Britain. ‘the patients have to meet certain criteria,’ she said. ‘Not all of them can be included in this programme ... if they have abnormalities, it is not our fault.
‘But once they are included we will perform up to three cycles and if after transferring all of the embryos coming from these cycles,
‘Emotional and vulnerable’
the patient does not have a healthy baby, we will refund the money.
‘Many patients come to our clinic to do egg donation because in Spain we have many donors. And most importantly, at the end we have very good pregnancy rates.’
Nick Macklon, a professor of obstetrics at Southampton Univer- sity, said the offer might be attractive to some couples. ‘there are some who will have a budget that they want to put into having a baby, and what this perhaps does is give them some certainty that they are not going to be endlessly forking out money,’ he said.
But Dr Geeta Nargund, an NHS adviser and director of CREATE IVF clinic said: ‘While “no baby, no fee” sounds compelling to those desperate for a child, it is an inappropriate form of marketing to people who are often emotional and vulnerable.’ Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on reproductive Ethics, said: ‘ It sounds more like a “no win, no fee” legal construct than a genuine approach to curing infertility.
‘the commercialisation of reproduction seems to have no bounds.’