Stop peddling IVF lies to desperate women

Ageneration ago, infertility was a lifelong sentence. Medicine could offer no help and couples had to choose between adopting or remaining childless. now, iVF — and all its satellite services, from egg-freezing to sperm donation — promises women they can have it all.

the past four decades have seen astonishing advances in science and technology, which has meant fertility is now considered a right; something to be expected and fixed. an entire private industry has sprung up around the promise that everyone, regardless of biology, can be a parent. Focus on your career and relationships and see the world, and when you’re ready to settle down, medicine will step in and help you defy the odds by becoming pregnant.

But women have been sold a lie. as far as nature is concerned, having a child is not a right but a biological privilege — and one with a tight time frame. Delay at your peril. While science may allow us to improve the odds, slightly, it is far more limited than those in the iVF industry would have us believe.

iVF doctors champion their speciality and the incredible advances made in recent years in their field, but many other Working doctors are more reticent.

in mental health, i have seen the fall-out of women who have left motherhood until their late-30s or even early-40s under the impression they can buy their way there. When they fail to do this, they are racked with grief and guilt that they left it so late.

among women aged 42 to 43, just 3 per cent will end up with a baby. For those over 44, the success rate is 1 per cent. the message from these statistics should be that iVF rarely works and women shouldn’t bank on it being able to help them.

Yet women have been falsely reassured iVF will give them what they want. Something needed to change. Last week, it was announced that iVF clinics must finally be clear with patients about their success rates and charges, under new guidance from the Competition and Markets authority.

about time. iVF operates in the Wild West of medicine. While there are strict guidelines around its procedures and processes, there is little regulation over the promises it makes.

Clinics are free to play on people’s emotions and downplay the risks or chance of failure.

nHS guidelines recommend that women under the age of 40 should be offered three cycles, and those between 40 and 42 offered only one.

it is not recommended over the age of 42 at all, owing to the incredibly low success rate.

However, this opens up a whole lucrative market for private clinics, which can target women who are desperate and aware that time is rapidly running out.

Some clinics charge up to £20,000 per iVF cycle, despite the Human Fertilisation and embryology authority (HFea) advising it should not cost more than £5,000. the price often increases because clinics offer ‘add-ons’, treatments that supposedly help the chances of a successful pregnancy.

However, a research project led by Carl Heneghan at oxford University found the majority of these add-ons were unnecessary, with some having no evidence backing them up at all. too many in the iVF industry are little more than snake-oil salesmen. there’s also a perverse incentive for clinics to overstate the success of iVF to encourage women to delay trying for a baby, and thus ensure they will need increasingly costly procedures later on. Yes, for some women these clinics might offer hope — and even the slimmest glimmer is, for many, better than nothing.

But it’s not just the appallingly low success rates of iVF that are ignored. the psychological aspects of going through this procedure — especially for older women who have a sense of panic as time moves on — are also routinely brushed under the carpet by the industry.

Couples embarking on iVF for the first time will struggle to appreciate quite how gruelling, exhausting, disappointing, frustrating and, ultimately for many, futile it will be. even for those for whom it is successful, the toil of treatment can leave nerves frayed and relationships rocky.

BUtbecause the technology exists, there is an assumption that those who struggle to conceive must go down the iVF path without question. People don’t talk so much about the negative impact of iVF, so the psychological and physical strain couples are placed under, the true cost, is never properly aired.

there’s a sense that this treatment is sold as a definitive answer to infertility — a cure-all, even — when the reality is much less straightforward.

the brave new world of reproductive technology — ushered in with the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, in 1978 — promised a cure to the alleged blight of infertility. Yet this has not proved to be the case.

it still fails more often than it works. that’s pretty poor odds for something that is so costly and so draining.

BOSSES got into trouble after an employment tribunal found they should not have told an employee to take off her headphones as it helped with her anxiety. Am I the only one who rolls his eyes at these kinds of stories? It seems that mental health is increasingly being used by people to demand what they want.