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

[Yaerry]

or am I just naive? Watched the new documentary about Jean Purdy and I’m surprised there was so much push back at the time. It’s made me wonder if one day surrogacy will be more accepted? I thought ivf was just a standard thing now that wasn’t controversial.

Most people TRY to conceive, I.e they have their babies on purpose. They choose to get pregnant...

He was a donor of sperm. He was not and is not her father.

@pinksheetss my sister is a doctor for the NHS and she is the result of IVF, many people on this thread could have potentially benefitted from her existence 🥰 although I did read one person refer to the existence of 10 million people as 'ridiculous'

There are many things in medicine that don't 'fix' the issue, they help if, some issues can't be fixed. Although my mum did have IVF to have my siblings but had me naturally a few years later, so maybe it did fix the issue.

As I said in an early post I take it that poster isn't in favour of prosthetic legs on the NHS - it doesn't 'fix' limb loss/absence and people with one leg could use crutches.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school/ib-knowledge/finance/ageing-populations-and-declining-birth-rates-are-they-really-such-catastrophe/

50 years ago if you were infertile you had a pretty good chance of adopting a new born. The rise of fertility treatment has gone almost arm in arm with the decline in babies available for adoption. We were exploring adoption as an option but knew we were very unlikely to be able to adopt a baby, that most children in need of homes have levels of additional needs/trauma that means green around the gills first time parents aren't a great fit. The reason we weren't actively pursuing adoption was that I had fallen pregnant naturally (twice in 8 years, both end in miscarriages) so it was possible that I could do so again and adoption agency required us to promise we would stop TTC. If we had reached a point when we had reached the end of the road on trying to conceive we would have pursued adoption but we were weren't ready to give up when DS arrived.

@RogueFemale "And thanks to the changing nature of work, we could continue to be productive for longer. Today, jobs in developed economies are seldom physically demanding. Whereas once running a farm demanded the hard toil of dozens of women and men from dawn till dusk, for instance, now only a handful of people are needed given the enormous effectiveness of modern machines. Technological advances mean that being 60 today is not the 60 of a century or even 50 years ago. That we choose to retire and spend decades at leisure is proof of wealth and success." so we will all just work into our old age and never retire and you think that's a good thing?

"An older population will place undoubted pressure on health spending and revenues, however this will in part be offset by lower spending on young people’s education" .. who's going to be treating the older population? 😵‍💫

Are you also against forms of contraception like the coil? With the coil, sperm and eggs fertilise into embryos but they are prevented from implanting - actually very similar to discarded embryos from IVF - yet it's contraception

I have a family member with a prosthetic so I know (a little bit) about the availability, likewise provision of wheelchairs from public funding. I'm aware that there isn't endless money to provide the very best possible treatment/care in many many fields and that most have a compromise of 'we can provide this but if you want beyond the basic you will need to fund it'.

Based on that surely the reverse applies to IVF? They will always know they were 100% wanted, to the extent that their parents (particularly mother) were willing to go through tests and invasive procedures for the sole purpose of having them? My daughter is currently only nearly 3 but I often think no matter what else happens at least she'll always know she was very much wanted (I was the result of an accidental pregnancy and as children my sister would often taunt me with "Which one of us was planned again?").

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.

He IS her biological father.

Kids know they have a biological mother and biological father.

Trying to gaslight someone who is dealing with complex feelings because they make YOU uncomfortable is awful.

If people are arguing that the NHS can't fund IVF the thought that they'd invest ANY funds into unexplained infertility is truly laughable.

Next to nothing is known about female reproduction you just have to look at the thousands of women with endometriosis left suffering to see that.

Your extremely insensitive language is pretty disgusting.

I agree.

Donor conceived children have a right to their feelings and opinions. Stating they have no “father” is biologically incorrect and cruel.

Are you quoting from a google search summary from Science Direct, by chance?
Other studies, NHS included, show no increased risk and that risk in all study groups increased with a mental health history.

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

IVF is becoming controversial in certain places now, particularly in America, because the way some states define a baby for the purposes of restricting abortion access also captures embryos generated as part of the IVF process. There is a reasonably sized crossover between people who are anti-abortion and people who are anti-IVF in some places.

IVF babies have better outcomes in almost all measurable areas and this has been found in many studies.

Once all other variables were accounted for like area where they live and parents professions and with/class they all still had better outcomes. The reason given was that none of them were accidents, they were all very planned children and they were cherished and doted on more than usual because their parents idolised them after everything they had been through and how desperate they were to have them.

You are just plain wrong. The sperm donor is the biological father. Words have meanings, you can't just decide that phrase doesn't mean what it means because you don't agree with it.

I think there’s might be some flawed causation here - Its been a couple years since i last did PND training so I will prefix this by saying the data may have changed but at the time i was taught that PND is higher in older mothers. IVF mums tend to be older as it’s taken longer to conceive.

It is also higher in ‘ higher achieving’ women - partly for the reason you have attributed to ivf , but also because they have placed greater pressure on themselves to be the ‘best’ throughout their lives and apply that thinking to motherhood which is very hard to be the ‘best’ at . Given the financial and time pressures of ivf , often it will be ‘higher achieving’ women who able to accessing it .

So IVF mums will typically have greater risk factors but that is different than the IVF route being the cause.

I’m not sure you can quantify love but having done both, I think it’s fair to say it’s a hell of a lot more brutal to go through ivf and invasive surgery than a good old fashioned roll in the hay .

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.

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.

“There is ample evidence that women who have been through IVF are more likely to develop PND.”

This study suggests it has no impact:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26663705/