Young women need to wake up and realise IVF is NOT the safety net they think it is

As UK fertility chief warns clinics must be more honest, a heart-felt plea from one who knows...

WOuLD I have believed it had someone told my 18year-old self that I’d end up spending upwards of £70,000 on IVF in the pursuit of having a baby? Never.

And if you’d told me that aged 43, after 11 rounds of unsuccessful treatment, I would walk away emptyarmed, would I have done things differently? Maybe not. My pursuit of motherhood became all-consuming.

But would I like to go back and shake my 18-year-old self and tell her to get real about how difficult it can be to get pregnant in your mid-30s and beyond; that IVF is not a safety net that will give you a baby if you encounter difficulties? Most definitely, yes.

Honest

IVF — and its more recent spin- offs: egg, sperm and embryo donation; surrogacy; egg freezing; genetic testing and editing — is a scientific miracle. Pioneered in the uK 40 years ago, it has given millions of people the families they dream of.

But — and it’s a big but — what many people don’t realise is that most of the time it doesn’t work.

That’s why I welcome the comments made by Sally Cheshire, Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (the uK’s regulator of fertility treatment) who said that ‘clinics shouldn’t be trading on hope. They should be honest and transparent about a woman or a couple’s chances’ of conceiving.

From this you can infer that some clinics are not being honest and transparent. In my case, I believe every doctor I saw did their best to give me a baby. My husband and I did make perfect embryos in the laboratory. And when I miscarried several times, those doctors said we would eventually succeed if we kept trying.

I’m not saying it’s their fault we didn’t. But did they clearly explain my statistical odds of success when we started treatment, and the diminishing returns with every year that passed? No. Did they suggest unproven and unlicensed treatments to increase my chances? Yes.

And did I take out loans and remortgage my house to pay for it all? I’m afraid I did.

The problem is that the booming fertility industry is at worst murky and at best opaque when you are a patient who has never been taught how to read the statistics a clinic will present you with in a bid to win your business.

With IVF on the NHS declining and the private sector growing rapidly, patients are facing myriad options, and it can be difficult to cut through the garbage.

When you find yourself, as I did, struggling to conceive in your mid-30s, you are in a race against time and your desperation can lead you to try anything, just in case that intervention is the one that works.

In my bid to get pregnant, I did everything the doctors (and Google) told me to do. I had acupuncture; I took homeopathic supplements; I had my womb scratched to aid implantation; I paid for 24hour film footage of my embryos to decide which ones were the best to put back; and I had steroid injections to encourage my immune system to behave.

I was complicit in all this — but I was also extremely vulnerable. I was ashamed my body couldn’t do what every other woman finds so easy to do; and hopeful that next month the nightmare would be over and I’d be able to join ‘the mummy club’, too.

I was afraid to admit that my brilliant career — as an executive director of a big London theatre — wasn’t enough after women have fought to be seen as more than wives and mothers for so long; and trusting of a science still considered by many to be a magic bullet. What I learned the hard way — and what I want the world to know — is that it isn’t.

I passionately want the next generation of young people to be better educated on the facts about male and female reproductive ageing and to have more open conversations about what should come first — the career or the egg.

A man produces sperm for the whole of his life. But a woman is born with her lifetime supply of eggs, and by the time she reaches her mid-30s they have radically reduced in quantity and quality.

Women are no longer having children at the biologically optimum age — their mid-20s. More over 30s are getting pregnant than ever before.

With many people studying, fighting to get on the career ladder, finding a partner and paying the rent, the increasing age of first-time motherhood simply isn’t something we should necessarily be cheering about.

Trauma

It also means there is increasing probability that women will end up struggling to conceive. Even if they achieve a baby in the end, they may have to go through four to five years of psychological and physical trauma that is likely to stay with them into parenthood and quite possibly the rest of their life.

And for women who do not start on that IVF journey until their late 30s and increasingly their 40s ( the number of women in their 40s having fertility treatment has doubled since 2004), the statistical chances of success are very low. In fact after 40, you have less than 10 per cent chance of conceiving with IVF if you are using your own eggs — a success rate that drops to one per cent if you are 44 and older.

The fact that the number of women entering their 40s childless has doubled in a generation is no surprise, but it is a sadness for many.

IVF is a lottery — and you may still decide to play it. But the important thing is that you need to know that it’s a game of chance.

It’s also vital that you fully understand the rules. When we see celebrities getting pregnant in their 40s and 50s, they are probably using donor eggs from a woman in her early 20s. Besides, how many more are trying and failing to conceive in attempts that don’t make the headlines?

Even if you are young and fully fertile, nature doesn’t work every time, so neither does IVF.

Emotional

After 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, I gave up on my dream of motherhood and became a campaigner. I established the Fertility Fest, which aims to bring patients and professionals together to discuss all aspects of fertility, infertility, the science of making babies and modern families.

The fertility industry has to get better at helping its patients. It needs to support them fully through the emotional journey of what will be one of the most difficult and, if it fails, devastating times of their lives.

What this doesn’t mean is guaranteeing them a baby — there are no guarantees. Nor does it mean refusing people treatment where the chances of success are minuscule; or stopping trying new drugs and technology because the science hasn’t yet proved their efficacy — science has to start somewhere and we must respect patient choice.

But it does mean being more honest about the fact that reproductive science is still in its early stages, that there’s much about it we don’t know, and that most of the time it doesn’t work.

If only more young women were informed of this simple fact, it would spare them a lot of heartache.