Oh, here we go again. Of course it's not technically a right to have children. How can it be, when nothing, even extreme levels of IVF, can guarantee one? But it IS a right (or entitlement, to be technical) to be treated equally by the government that runs the country.
That means that if you have a medical problem and the government creates an NHS specifically designed to treat medical problems, you DO have a right to NHS treatment for your infertility. Naturally, this can get dicey -- if you can't have children because you're gay, it will go to whether you feel being gay is a choice or a biological fact, etc etc.
You do not have a natural right to walk, in the sense that many people spend their lives in wheelchairs and we don't have the medical ability yet to fix them all. Does that mean if your leg is broken it shouldn't be set in the NHS?
You don't have a right to live forever. Does that mean if you get cancer at 22 you shouldn't be treated on the NHS?
The NHS cannot cover everything. And there are ways to think about rationing: eg.
- whether a problem is cheap to fix. People go on about how expensive infertility is, but Clomid costs pennies, and even IVF is much cheaper than a broken leg, even three rounds, than a broken leg, because it doesn't involve a hospital stay.
- whether a problem is self-inflicted. But of course, we do cover smoking-related lung cancer, obesity-related heart attacks and diabetes, skiing injuries etc.
- whether there's a medical problem, a failure of normal functions, involved. But then why are we covering birth control and childbirth (getting pregnant is normal; the solution is choosing not to have sex, right?)
-whether the public benefits from spending its money this way. Do we all agree we'd prefer not to have to walk by old ladies dying in the streets? That it might bring in more tax to pay for cataract surgery than to let people with minimal eyesight fall down the stairs and fix their broken hips on the NHS? That perhaps society needs at least some births to keep the pyramid going? This is complicated.
- finally, how it relates to quality of life. Believe it or not, this is measured in many national health services and philosophical systems, looking at questions like how much difference treatment makes, how much more life the patient has to live, etc etc. Again, complicated. I'm not going there, personally!
What we shouldn't be doing is rationing in the NHS based on whether we ourselves need the help being paid for. It's far more ethical that everybody SHOULD pay 5 p or £5 more in that case, or else you're saying you don't believe in a taxpayer-funded healthcare service at all and everyone should pay for their own treatment. In which case the whole basis of all insurance, private or state, is undermined. And in which case, feel free to move to the US and try their HMOs, which in my experience are far worse than the NHS for bureaucracy and rationing, or try, maybe, one of those third-world countries where they can't even afford to build roads?