To think some older women having tax payers funded ivf are hypocrites?

[Spiderbug]

There seems to be a substantial group of people who are ok with calling teen mums a waste of their tax money but then leave child bearing too late and expect the tax payers to foot the bill for their multiple ivf cycles which costs the tax payer up to 100 million a year.

Hypocrites!!!

That's some massively inaccurate stuff you're spouting there.

Its not really an excuse though is it?

I was a teen mum, I was 15 and in year 11 when I got pregnant. I had a science teacher go off on a rant one day in class about how unfair it was that she couldn't have children but teen girls can go spread their legs and have babies that they don't deserve and rub it in her face.

In actual fact I was being horribly abused by my boyfriend at the time, he had stealthed me and threatened to tell everybody that I killed his baby if I had an abortion.

I walked out of the class and refused to ever go back. The class teacher was switched. I was never given any form of apology by anybody at the school and the teacher was not reprimanded as far as I know. I faced a lot of judgement as a teen parent but that by far was the worst, most humiliating and upsetting incident. So much so that I still think about it 14 years later. Personally I'd argue that perhaps she didn't in fact deserve to have children as she was a truly horrible person and her infertility is not an excuse for that.

Let me guess, you were able to conceive naturally/able to pay for private IVF?

Whose entire life is funded by benefits? Not mine I’ve been working since my dc started school. Same age a lot of people are still at university on their government loan that they never pay back

That's pretty unpleasant. Pregnant teenagers often had extremely difficult upbringings.

Good for you. Not everyone does. Where I grew up, there is basically no jobs. Most people options were moved away, scrape by in retail topped up by benefits or get pregnant and live on benefits. So many of my year group from school did the last one instead of college/uni/finding a job.

So when people are talking about young mum's on benefits, it's those people they're thinking about. From deprived areas and not willing to put in the work to break the cycle.

It's a generalisation. Doesn't apply to every young mum. Much like you're making about people being hypocrites for using a service available to them because one person who has done it was disrespectful to you. It doesn't apply to all of them. Just that one.

And usually from poverty.

Rage bait alert!

I've never heard anyone call teen mums a tax drain and I've certainly not heard that opinion to any woman in her late 30s or early 40s who's paying for their own IVF.

There's a comment above saying you see a lot of it. Where? The rate of teen mums has dropped loads in the UK, it's not the same issue it once was, it's not the hot topic. I wonder if the OP's got themself into some sort of echo chamber?

With the same access to free contraceptives as anyone else.
And there are always options

But, playing devils advocate, I am saying that those very few mature women who may have (for whatever genuine reason) CHOSEN not to conceive in their youth and have contributed into the system for maybe 20 plus years and who have to risk the NHS postcode lottery on whether they get help to conceive or pay privately are not hypocrites because you are not comparing like for like.

Just like there are some women who leave it late to have kids (biologically speaking) there are an increasingly large number of single women who are choosing to be single parents to not just one but multiple children who then rely on the state to bring them and their families up?

Being a devils advocate, do you not thing that the mature women in this scenario, can look at you and say that their chances of getting a baby on the NHS are slim because they will not meet the NHS criteria for IVF and that they will need to pay privately. And when they do have that child they have a better chance of being more financially independent with 20yrs of working life behind them and perhaps a mortgage. Why is their decision any less valid than yours?

These women are totally different to the mature women who have medical reasons for not being able to conceive or have held that they needed to wait for the right permanent Father to come along and when they did, found it harder to conceive? The NHS will only accept them if they fulfil a very strict criteria?

What criteria did the young single women have to fulfil to get pregnant and have children? I'm not getting at you here, accidents happen when you are young and you have choices and your choice was to have the child. Some single women actively chose to be single mums. Why can't single mature women who have contributed to the state make the same decisions. You are being hypocritical here. You sound almost jealous.

They only know about those contraceptives if they've had the proper education though. And many are in areas of poverty or repeating cycles they've seen as "normal".

That's horrible. I'm so sorry you went through that.

Women who are resentful when other women conceive accidentally or easily are vile, especially if they've deliberately delayed TTC until their mid-thirties or later. It's the equivalent of not studying for an exam until ten minutes before it starts, and then complaining that it's unfair that the "swots" passed and you didn't.

@Spiderbug Sorry I think you're getting an unnecessarily hard time on this thread op. You were clear from the beginning that you were talking about who you see as hypocrites i.e. ones who criticised you as a very young mum, who are now on the ivf journey paid for by the tax payers( as they've left it til they're too old to conceive naturally). You didn't comment on IVF users in general being hypocritical. It was clear. Probably just the initial thread title (without context) is a bit inflammatory.

Ofc no official stats linking the above, that'd be tricky. It'd be rare to find a woman going through IVF, who admits to criticising teen mums (even if they did).

hip and knee replacements for advanced osteoarthritis are also elective surgeries, should they not be offered on the NHS?

We couldn’t get funding for it, many only fund one cycle too.
IVF is a big decision and expensive. I wouldn’t want to do it again. I never had the weird views about teen mums though, that you seem to think those having IVF have! Such a weird post.

Everything non-emergency is elective surgery!
hernias, cataracts, joint replacements, gall bladder ops…. What are you talking about?
why is reproductive medicine less important?

Any non emergency procedures are elective.

Not necessarily. Our hospital also does oral surgery and plenty other optional procedures that wouldn’t make you disabled not having it.

No, but you’re incredibly rude. Resulting to name calling says a lot about you.

Maybe not of the individual but the falling birth rates could be the start of the death of humans as a species.

Not commenting on whether it's a good or a bad thing, but if humans are to survive, more babies are required.

They are elective. You won’t die without a hip replacement. You can use a wheelchair. Any joint replacements done for reasons other than major trauma to the joint are elective.

revise your understanding of language, genius.