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April 16, 2020 - 7:00am
Today all fertility treatment in the UK stops by order of the regulator, the HEFA (Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority). New treatments, including sperm donor insemination, were stopped in March, which was bad enough for those who had saved up, planned and pinned their hopes on a timely treatment plan. But as of yesterday, even those in the middle of an IVF cycle will have the door shut in their face. A grim announcement on the HEFA website reads:
Time is the very essence of fertility treatment and yet this po-faced message shows utter disregard for it. Its hollow opening line about ‘a difficult time’ doesn’t offer solutions: only vague, schoolmarmish talk about the NHS coming first and social distancing. Women, told that every week, even every day, matters for conception, are now to wait until ‘the impact… on NHS services’ is deemed manageable. How this ‘impact’ is measured, or has ever been measured, is not clarified. How long is a piece of string?
And what exactly is meant by ‘pressure’? I spoke to a senior NHS manager friend about this last night: neither she nor I could see how fertility services, especially private ones (also banned) put undue pressure on the NHS, when patients are dealt with in specialised clinics. Are fertility patients more likely to spread Covid-19? Are fertility clinics particularly infectious places? Unlikely.
If a crisis in women’s mental health isn’t enough, there is another hypocritical aspect to the ban. Our whole lives have been reshaped around preventing deaths from Covid-19. But in causing untold pain and stress by halting all fertility treatment, the HEFA has also put the kibosh on thousands of new lives. Indeed if the present shut-down goes on for a year, 20,000 desperately wanted babies will not be born. That also happens to be the high end of estimates for Covid-19 related deaths in the UK.
For every day of single-minded focus on the virus to the exclusion of all else, more painful side effects emerge. This decision will be a blow for thousands of women. And for a body purporting to be concerned with public health and saving lives it seems shamefully short-sighted.
realzoestrimpel
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SubscribeInfertility is not (in most cases) an illness, it’s a random physical characteristic. Taxpayers should not be expected to fund remedies for this, any more than they should fund correcting my random physical characteristic, which is being too short to be a pole-vaulter.
Are you really serious? This is something you worry about in the current crisis?
There are very many painful side effects of the Covid19 crisis but fertility services must rank pretty low? Or is this one of those ‘women affected most’ cases?
I expect gender reassignment has also found itself mysteriously relegated to a non-issue compared to actual life or death medical interventions.
The World Bank estimates that the earth’s population is growing by 81 million a year. That is over 2 per second! UNICEF estimates that there are 15.1 million children in the world who have lost both parents.
Given these frightening facts it is difficult to muster any credible argument for fertility treatment over adoption. I know I will be slagged off by people saying “its not the same as having your own baby”. Maybe not, but it does not justify scientific intervention that actually adds to overpopulation problems. It is also indifferently cruel to those hordes of orphans desperate for a loving family to take them in.
Over 200,000 babies were killed by abortion in the UK last year. Bizarre how some people are desperate for a baby whilst others dispose of them as unwanted.
Less fertility treatment is likely to mean fewer babies. In the present seriously overcrowded world that strikes me as a good thing. We do NOT need to be spending scarce taxpayer money on wholly unnecessary attempts to increase the population. Better contraception and better sex education would be a much better idea.
Abortions also cost lives.
And what, Zoe, have we learned about the callous, impersonal, self-serving, finger-wagging, one-size-fits-none nature of health services in this country?
Nothing? Oh…