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

That's just hyperbole. There's a difference between saying people can and do get over being infertile, and saying someone who is infertile should 'just get over it'. On the thread I've seen the former, not the latter.

And “your” pretty dense, aren’t you?

"would have sold my soul for the chance to maybe conceive."
But is this not another downside of the increasing range of fertility treatments, like a double edge sword?

50 years ago if you were infertile then the only option was to grieve it and try to make the best of life. Then 40 years ago the option arrived to suffer through unpleasant treatment as many times as you could before you bankrupt yourself or got too old, then along came donor IVF, so know you need to keep selling your soul until your what, 60, maybe 70, once your start where do you stop. IVF is definitely a Pandora's box.

This is a thread asking whether the ethical side of IVF should still be up for discussion, so of course the thorny issues relating to it are going to keep coming up, and none of the answers are black and white.

I don’t think anyone on this thread is advocating that IVF be used by 60 and 70 year olds. Stop sensationalising the issue and try to have some empathy instead. (Something that seems sorely lacking on this thread).

It doesn’t fix the person though. If you fixed the person they could create their own embryo and carry to term.

Your creating a new human outside of the body not fixing the issue.

"would have sold my soul for the chance to maybe conceive."
But is this not another downside of the increasing range of fertility treatments, like a double edge sword?

50 years ago if you were infertile then the only option was to grieve it and try to make the best of life. Then 40 years ago the option arrived to suffer through unpleasant treatment as many times as you could before you bankrupt yourself or got too old, then along came donor IVF, so know you need to keep selling your soul until your what, 60, maybe 70, once your start where do you stop. IVF is definitely a Pandora's box.

This is a thread asking whether the ethical side of IVF should still be up for discussion, so of course the thorny issues relating to it are going to keep coming up, and none of the answers are black and white.

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.

I didn’t know older people ie 60s could use ivf?!?

I am 33 - someone I went to school with has 6 kids, one of whom is already known as a local county lines runner at 14. She had the custody of the youngest children handed to their father. She has had 6 births/perinatal treatment on the NHS.

In 2018 it was estimated that a straightforward birth & postnatal care cost the NHS ~£4000, I’m sure will have now gone up. And that was not including prenatal care/complications/NICU stays etc.

My close friend is a nurse who had to borrow money from her in laws for IVF because she wasn’t eligible through the very service she works for. It worked for her first time, and she is a wonderful mother.

now tell me how withholding IVF from people like her is fair, when there are people that can rack up expenses as much as they like purely because of their biology.

I think you’re being extremely polite here. I’m actually aghast at some of the comments on this thread. There have been multiple examples of callousness, rudeness, misinformation, dismissiveness and downright cruelty. Those unable to conceive have been told to get over it, one poster vociferously claimed that this particular disability shouldn’t be funded though her own should be (and by the sounds of it, to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds), one got downright vicious when talking about the possibility of a loving sister being a surrogate as if there is no nuance at all. The mind boggles, truly. I am so, so lucky that I conceived all my children easily but I absolutely know that if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t just be able to ‘accept it’ but would have sold my soul for the chance to maybe conceive. To speak to and about women in that position with such a lack of compassion as has been demonstrated here is frankly horrifying. People do need to educate themselves, reflect, or in some cases just get a filter!

I think you’re being extremely polite here. I’m actually aghast at some of the comments on this thread. There have been multiple examples of callousness, rudeness, misinformation, dismissiveness and downright cruelty. Those unable to conceive have been told to get over it, one poster vociferously claimed that this particular disability shouldn’t be funded though her own should be (and by the sounds of it, to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds), one got downright vicious when talking about the possibility of a loving sister being a surrogate as if there is no nuance at all. The mind boggles, truly. I am so, so lucky that I conceived all my children easily but I absolutely know that if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t just be able to ‘accept it’ but would have sold my soul for the chance to maybe conceive. To speak to and about women in that position with such a lack of compassion as has been demonstrated here is frankly horrifying. People do need to educate themselves, reflect, or in some cases just get a filter!

I think you’re being extremely polite here. I’m actually aghast at some of the comments on this thread. There have been multiple examples of callousness, rudeness, misinformation, dismissiveness and downright cruelty. Those unable to conceive have been told to get over it, one poster vociferously claimed that this particular disability shouldn’t be funded though her own should be (and by the sounds of it, to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds), one got downright vicious when talking about the possibility of a loving sister being a surrogate as if there is no nuance at all. The mind boggles, truly. I am so, so lucky that I conceived all my children easily but I absolutely know that if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t just be able to ‘accept it’ but would have sold my soul for the chance to maybe conceive. To speak to and about women in that position with such a lack of compassion as has been demonstrated here is frankly horrifying. People do need to educate themselves, reflect, or in some cases just get a filter!

I do have an issue with IVF in that viable embryos are destroyed. Also I am not completely sure about it being available on the NHS, given how stretched resources are for other conditions like mental illness and life threatening illnesses.

I'm not suggesting that only cancer patients should get NHS funded treatment (or even that the NHS should definitely fund IVF) I'm just trying to get those who regard infertility as 'not an illness' to think things through in a bit more depth.
Do they feel the NHS shouldn't provide prosthetics legs because amputees could get about on crutches?
Do they think infertility shouldn't be covered at all e.g. no investigation into why a couple can't conceive, no gynecology ops that improve the chances of conception? If so do they hold a life saving only view on other areas covered by the NHS? Or other attempts to 'thwart nature', 'play god' etc.
The issue is never black and white and there are a million shades of grey in between 'all fertility treatment should be illegal' and 'the state should pay for unlimited tries with without any restrictions' most people will have an idea as to where they think the line should be drawn but lots of posters on this thread don't seem to have thought through the spectrum of options and are seeing it as a binary.

"The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) uses a cost-effectiveness threshold of £20,000 to £30,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) to guide its decision-making process. NICE considers interventions that cost less than £20,000 per QALY to be cost effective. Interventions that cost between £20,000 and £30,000 per QALY may also be considered cost effective if certain conditions are met"

NICE use QALY to determine funding decisions, IVF is expensive, with often poor success rates, and the distress of infertility is difficulty to quantify. It's not all about playing god, but about complicated economic decisions of doing the most for the most.

Personally, I don't think there's a 'right' to have children, nor does the planet need any more humans, therefore I disagree with ivf and surrogacy, whether publicly or privately funded.

I particularly disagree with women who get ivf as a single parent. I would absolutely hate to be the progeny of a single woman and an unknown father.

But egg/sperm donors don't give away children they give away gametes.

Babies born from donor gametes weren't unwanted by their biological parents because they didn't exist when the gametes were donated and weren't given away as children. Donors don't give eggs or sperm because they don't want the children they could possibly make, they give them to help people. Even if a baby concieved using donor sperm was wanted by the man that gave the sperm, he couldn't have had that child because the child wouldn't exist without the woman who used his sperm to make a baby and that baby is hers and her husband's not the donors.

I understand the trauma of adopted children knowing their biological parents didn't want them and gave them away but donor conceived children were never unwanted or given away it's completely different.

I'm not suggesting that only cancer patients should get NHS funded treatment (or even that the NHS should definitely fund IVF) I'm just trying to get those who regard infertility as 'not an illness' to think things through in a bit more depth.
Do they feel the NHS shouldn't provide prosthetics legs because amputees could get about on crutches?
Do they think infertility shouldn't be covered at all e.g. no investigation into why a couple can't conceive, no gynecology ops that improve the chances of conception? If so do they hold a life saving only view on other areas covered by the NHS? Or other attempts to 'thwart nature', 'play god' etc.
The issue is never black and white and there are a million shades of grey in between 'all fertility treatment should be illegal' and 'the state should pay for unlimited tries with without any restrictions' most people will have an idea as to where they think the line should be drawn but lots of posters on this thread don't seem to have thought through the spectrum of options and are seeing it as a binary.

I didn't know so many people were anti-surrogacy until I read MN. I have no skin in the game at all but this is a weird argument to me. Under capitalism we rent ourselves and our body parts out every day. We sell the use of our hands, legs, voices, muscles, brains. Some body parts more than others depending on job. Why not wombs as well, if it's the woman's choice?

Unless you're against the idea that any part of us should be transactional at all in which case I'm quite sympathetic to the anarcho-communist utopia you're going for actually.

The problem here though is that the fertility needs of a women diagnosed with cancer are not greater or more important than the women with infertility of a different or unknown cause. So ethically you have to go all out (with realistic age limits) but the NHS can't afford this. Arguable not providing it to anyone is more ethical than one person's medical cause of infertility trumping anothers.

But this is the crux of the NHS funding debate across just about every speciality.