To ask if people today don’t agree with ivf?!

Is that what family are? A lifestyle choice? Reserved for who, exactly? 🧐

Surely you could say why bother with therapy for anything then? You have a bereavement why bother with therapy there's nothing they can do to make it better?

If the IVF doesn't work you still need to treat the mental health effects of infertility which I assume will be even worse by this point.

We don't assign moral judgements to people who give themselves a disease or injury. If we did there would be hardly anyone left to treat! When we talk about children being a lifestyle choice we mean it's a want not a need. Dying of lung cancer and seeking treatment is very much a need, whether it was self-inflicted or not.

People who have ivf are not actively choosing to not have children though are they? They are generally going through mental agony.
People do choose to smoke even though we have known about the risks for years

There isn't a treatment to bring back your dead loved one so therapy is the only option. There are possible treatments for some, but not all infertile couples.
My mental health improved during treatment, I felt I was 'giving it a good go' and 'trying everything we could'. We started from realistic position of knowing the odds and agreeing what our limits were (how many rounds we would try, whether we would consider donor gamates, what other options we could explore). Had we ended up childless I think I would have been far better placed to move on with life after IVF than I was before it and month after month of dashed hope.

Was your friend told she was donor conceived as soon as she could begin to start to understand (likely as a toddler) and does she know who her donor is/is she able to contact them?

I think some of the people against donor conception on Mumsnet don’t understand that things have greatly moved on in the UK in the last couple of decades. It is now standard practice/strongly advised by mandatory counselling in clinics here to tell your child asap that they are donor conceived (so it’s never a shock for them), and also mandatory in a clinic in the UK to have a non anonymous donor too - with the hope/expectation to have some level of contact with the donor once DC is an adult (or earlier with online help) if that is what the DC wants.

I haven’t heard of any donor conceived people in that situation having any issues with their conception (and I did a lot of research before having my DC with IVF using donor sperm in a clinic here). Personally I’m in touch online with my DC’s sperm donor already - I think a lot of donors are happier to be in contact than they were in the past as there has been lots of research into the benefits of contact/or more information for the DC, and donors know they have no chance of anonymity now.

In terms of the general thread, obviously I am in favour in principle for well informed donor conception and/or IVF - and I suspect many of the posters completely against it on here either haven’t done much research to the realities of it (in the UK currently) or have no experience of it themselves.

I have no experience of surrogacy myself so can’t be certain on that - only to say that I have read a lot of articles about commercial surrogacy that do seem paint a very bleak picture (as it does for ill informed, non altruistic egg donation too to be fair). I have no idea if the same is always the case for family/friend surrogacy or genuine, well informed, altruistic surrogacy (or egg donation) though. Unfortunately, like many of these things I suspect it is not a black/white picture and depends very much on the individuals involved - so I am glad we have strong regulation in the UK now for both donor conception and surrogacy compared to other countries.

Of course. If not being able to have biological kids is affecting someone's mental health then they should be offered therapy etc.

@Fairyliz comparing not being able to have kids (which many people actively choose not to have and live very happily) to lung cancer, nice 🙄

Surely you could say why bother with therapy for anything then? You have a bereavement why bother with therapy there's nothing they can do to make it better?

If the IVF doesn't work you still need to treat the mental health effects of infertility which I assume will be even worse by this point.

I know this is controversial, but I don't believe that IVF is treatment that society should be spending funds on (private or public funds). I can't voice this out loud in person, as both family and friends have gone through successful and unsuccessful attempts to conceive by this route. I don't think it's necessary for society.

Why waste money on therapy when you can actually treat the problem?

My ovaries left to there own devices produced eggs at random intervals of who knows what quality.

What is anyone going to say in therapy that's going to make that any better?

The drugs aren’t dangerous for the majority of patients, the risks are very small, they are also well explained and patients are happy to go with those risks usually because they desperately want to be a mother.

It fixes the issue of childlessness. As far as I was concerned the pain of my childlessness needed fixing. I was broken before and IVF healed me. Even though I still have my endometriosis and still need to get further treatment for that physical issue, mentally I have healed enormously. I get to be a mother because of it and I will be forever grateful.

Plus something people may forget is that a lot of conditions cannot be treated whilst TTC. I could not take the medication that, whilst it has not resolved my endo, has given me so much more of my life pain free, and cured my PMDD entirely, because I needed to be ovulating to conceive. Without IVF I’d have had to accept childlessness and take the medication or just keep trying and suffering physically and mentally (as I did for the 4 years we TTC before treatment). I would have chosen the latter most likely because the mental anguish of not being a parent was too great to bear but it’s inhumane IMO to be left in severe pain and poor mental health when the potential solution is there, and in the case of my clinic, relatively cheap with good rates of success.

I can assure you my mental health was far worse when I was childless with no hope than it ever was when I was undertaking all my IVF cycles and ultimately, giving birth.

I can assure you my mental health was far worse when I was childless with no hope than it ever was when I was undertaking all my IVF cycles and ultimately, giving birth.

Of course. If not being able to have biological kids is affecting someone's mental health then they should be offered therapy etc.

Repeated unsuccessful attempts at IVF can be very bad for your mental health too.

That’s not necessarily true.

There is ample evidence that women who have been through IVF are more likely to develop PND. The thinking behind it is seems to be that because there has been such a struggle to conceive, the person idealises parenthood to an unrealistic degree.

Personally I know two people who had IVF, after multiple miscarriages, years of treatments, and both of them realised that while they’d wanted a baby due to natural broodyness, neither of them enjoyed being a mum, and said that if they’d known then what they knew now, they would never have gone through it.

One of them actually ended up going back to work full time after just eight weeks, whenever they went on holiday they had to find somewhere with full-time holiday clubs by day and babysitting by night, because she felt that although she worked from 8-6 Monday to Friday and her DH did half the childcare on weekends, she needed a break from her dD. It was incredibly sad.

I think we need to be careful not to essentially paint women who have been through IVF as heroes and make some kind of statement that their children are more loved because of what they have been through, because that’s simply not true, and is an insult to parents who love their children just as much, and that means of conception is not a barometer to how much a child is loved.

There is ultimately a difference between treating an existing person and their medical condition and creating a new person that cannot even start to exist without medical intervention.

A broken arm needs fixing, a blood clot busting, help in a Delivery, a tube unlocking a ectopic removing.

But giving dangerous drugs to release eggs to harvest and mix with sperm to then watch under microscope and then pick the best freeze and discard the rest to then insert back in, doesn’t fix an issue it’s not clearing a tube or casting a break it’s creating something entirely.

And surrogacy is just using women as incubators as an added kick to the above.

Should mental health not be treated then?

That’s not necessarily true.

There is ample evidence that women who have been through IVF are more likely to develop PND. The thinking behind it is seems to be that because there has been such a struggle to conceive, the person idealises parenthood to an unrealistic degree.

Personally I know two people who had IVF, after multiple miscarriages, years of treatments, and both of them realised that while they’d wanted a baby due to natural broodyness, neither of them enjoyed being a mum, and said that if they’d known then what they knew now, they would never have gone through it.

One of them actually ended up going back to work full time after just eight weeks, whenever they went on holiday they had to find somewhere with full-time holiday clubs by day and babysitting by night, because she felt that although she worked from 8-6 Monday to Friday and her DH did half the childcare on weekends, she needed a break from her dD. It was incredibly sad.

I think we need to be careful not to essentially paint women who have been through IVF as heroes and make some kind of statement that their children are more loved because of what they have been through, because that’s simply not true, and is an insult to parents who love their children just as much, and that means of conception is not a barometer to how much a child is loved.

No, not uncomfortable. Thanks for your concern, though.
Genetically connected. Not father.

That’s not necessarily true.

There is ample evidence that women who have been through IVF are more likely to develop PND. The thinking behind it is seems to be that because there has been such a struggle to conceive, the person idealises parenthood to an unrealistic degree.

Personally I know two people who had IVF, after multiple miscarriages, years of treatments, and both of them realised that while they’d wanted a baby due to natural broodyness, neither of them enjoyed being a mum, and said that if they’d known then what they knew now, they would never have gone through it.

One of them actually ended up going back to work full time after just eight weeks, whenever they went on holiday they had to find somewhere with full-time holiday clubs by day and babysitting by night, because she felt that although she worked from 8-6 Monday to Friday and her DH did half the childcare on weekends, she needed a break from her dD. It was incredibly sad.

I think we need to be careful not to essentially paint women who have been through IVF as heroes and make some kind of statement that their children are more loved because of what they have been through, because that’s simply not true, and is an insult to parents who love their children just as much, and that means of conception is not a barometer to how much a child is loved.