No single woman has a right to motherhood on the NHS
We all feel entitled to the kind of joy that would give a ‘happy face emoji’ lockjaw
f some of the key terms making up today’s Lexicon of Outrage need defining, let me help you out. “Offended” – as in “I’m offended you mistook me for the gender I am”/ “used an affectionate form of address with me” – translates as: “I feel invisible, and this is the easiest way to get attention.” “Triggered” – as in “by telling me upsetting historical or biological facts, my teacher triggered my anxiety issues” – is a variation on that same theme. And anything decried as “archaic” or “outdated” tends to mean that somewhere along the line, plain old common sense has been employed.
A new regional NHS policy banning single women from accessing IVF is being described by critics as both “shockingly outdated” and “demeaning”. And it’s true the wording of the leaked internal document used to justify the ban is brutal.
Current national NHS guidelines state that all women under the age of 43 who have been trying to get pregnant for two years should be offered IVF – which costs around £3,500 per cycle – but the new policy that makes single women in NHS South East London ineligible is based on findings that: “A sole woman is unable to bring out the best outcomes for the child.”
“Single mothers are generally poorer,” the 2011 document, seen by a Sunday newspaper, states, “thereby placing a greater burden on society in general.” And it concludes: “Denial of fertility treatment has a limited impact on a woman’s life satisfaction.”
As a woman (blessed enough to be a mother) I read those words through parted fingers. Because it’s hard for me to imagine anyone deliberately setting out to do something as tough as raising a child alone – although I know some do, and NHS South East London will doubtless have statistics backing up their controversial decision. Because the single mothers who read those words will be cut to the quick by the assumption their children won’t have “the best outcome”. And because, in the kind of bald localised terms these bodies have to think in, those statements are, no doubt, correct.
Inevitably, “denial of fertility treatment” has been read by dissenters as “denial of children”. And how could the effect of that denial on a woman desperate enough to go through the daily injections and complex series of procedures that IVF entails be “limited”?
Yet the word “denial” in that second context also implies that it is every woman’s right to be a mother: single, married, gay, straight or identifying as any one of the orientations laid out in a sexual smorgasbord for us by the PC brigade. And her right for that motherhood to be paid for by the state.
If we extend that entitlement
rationale to every area of life, we end up in a Roald Dahl-esque world not dissimilar to the one we’re living in now. Grandmothers who won’t be around to see their children graduate should have a right to have IVF. Maybe kids should be allowed to have kids. We should have a right to perfect health, despite our box-set deathmarch lifestyles. And to gorge on Krispy Kremes safe in the knowledge that we won’t be “fat shamed” by GPS who, frankly, should know better (I mean, hello? They put obese people on the cover of magazines now).
I should be allowed to have the breasts I want – and Angelina Jolie’s nose. And if I can prove the “psychological distress” those biological unfairnesses are causing me, the NHS might fork out for both. We are all entitled to the kind of 24/7 joy that would give a “happy face emoji” lockjaw. And if we don’t have that: we are entitled to drugs. All of this, it goes without saying, should be free.
I’m being flippant, when social infertility – a term that refers to women who have reached their 30s/40s but have not found a suitable partner to have a child with – is a very real and nuanced issue that can’t be comprehensively addressed either by a set of blunt NHS guidelines or indeed by this column. And as at least 42 per cent of marriages in England and Wales will end in divorce, the whataboutery we could enter into around something as sensitive and case dependent as “the best outcomes” for our children is endless.
What’s certain, however, is that all the options we now have at our disposal have only bred a permanent dissatisfaction with our lot. And perhaps one of the most surprising passages of the otherwise bone-dry document that the new guidance has been based on is where it quotes Aristotle’s principle of equality: “Treat equals equally, so a couple compared to a couple is equal. A woman or man compared to a couple is not equal, and by attempting to think of them as such has no ground or support.”
Those “shockingly outdated” words sound like plain common sense to me.