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!!!

no I was just saying I’ve been working since my dc started school when I was 20 and mentioned university students with their government loans that they never pay back to pre empt people from saying I was a drain from 16-20.

This In response to someone saying something about “a lifetime of benefits.”

I don't think you can know what a woman needing IVF opinions are so to suggest they are hypocrites is a massive reach and sounds more like your projection. Also there are plenty of younger women who have IVF and older women who don't. I think your OP is a bit unhinged actually.

IVF is not available to anyone ‘dissatisfied with her life’. It is only available to women who have a diagnosed cause for infertility. You can disagree with that too if you want, but at least do so from a place of fact.

Only since they started school? So that’s five or so years without factoring in more than one child. What did you do for money before that?

And again, IVF is almost never available to women over 40.

One year of benefits still costs more than one round of IVF.

If you're unable to work, then you're entitled to the benefits. If you need help to have a baby, you're entitled to that (regardless of whether people think this should be offered on the NHS or not, it is).

It's not hypocritical to make use of a service available to you, particularly not if you've paid into the pot that funds it, or will be paying into it.

Whatever someone's views, these are things available to people. And people make choices based on what's available to them.

Well what do you think? Five years is hardly a lifetime like that other poster said is it

Many areas 1 round if any.
and ttc for 3years and often wont fund over say 40 a nyway because less effective. v
so unless you are saying around 36 is that old.
Obviously 15 is a crazy age to have a dc. Are you still with the dad? As watching teen mom very very few were still together. Also at 15 likely the nan would have had to look after the dc while finishing gcses and maybe a levels

Our relative who had a child as a teeny
has only worked about 5 years now early 40s even having just 1 dc
had parents looking after gc for years and as a teen they moved in...
has lived with several men but ended up single.
Had a council house and benefits costing thousands a year
has obviously never paid tax to cover this and probably only ever paid 1k
the child now an adult has also only worked a few years and then also has a council house

its not a choice teen mom vs ivf for most as most people i know had kids relatively easily 30-37. Its ideally have a kid 25-35. But if you desperately want one try before 30.
I think the much much bigger tax cost and social of having kids older is the behaviour issues like autism and adhd. The parents i know who have kids closer to 40 have had multiple sen kids. (Asd).

However i think having kids young also can increase adhd risk...

Then you should have worded your earlier post better so your meaning was clear.

Do want the NHS to only fund life saving treatment?

So you claimed benefits? You say ‘what do you think’ but that’s why I asked. You might have been supported by your child’s father for all I knew. I also wondered if you had worked before until I saw your age when you had your kid.

It’s hypocritical to have a pop at others for taking out of the system when you did exactly that.

So do you do a well paid job?

If you were entirely supported by the state during this time then this would have cost the taxpayer more than 3 rounds of IVF.

I assume that by you using the word dime that you’re American/ in USA ? I’m unsure how taxation works there however I’m guessing that similar to here the younger you are the less tax “dollars” you will have paid ?

therefore

Older women will have contributed more towards tax etc because they have been earning longer, whilst younger women will go on to contribute more as their working lives develop.

The tax burden on you of supporting young mothers will lessen as you and they age.

We probably have different opinions on what age an old Mum is. I don’t think 25-40 is old.

In what way is that the same as deliberately not TTC until you’ve run out of viable eggs? You want to talk in broad brush terms and say ‘don’t wait until after 35’ then say so, don’t use bizarre analogies.

You can absolutely think people shouldn’t until they’re older, but the reality is that economic and social life makes really difficult, and most women aren’t deliberately running down the clock. They’re trying to get their life together, enjoy it, have a decent partner, enough money to be able to give themselves and their children opportunities and a good quality of life.

And you’re calling those women ‘vile’ for having emotions about struggling with fertility.

Can only imagine you’ve got everything tip top in your own life, and that you’re pontificating from your ivory tower. You’re a young mum, your kids are healthy and well provided for, partner in good and stable work, house on the way to being paid for, you live in a good area for schools and sports and activities, you or your partner don’t have any health issues, you’re not a carer for a parent, grandparent or sibling. Good for you.

Older parents are quite likely to pay a lot more in taxes than teen parents and are likely to take a lot less out of the system in subsidies and benefits.

Also, everyone I know who has had IVF has had pre-existing fertility issues not related to age. For many, the reason they have IVF older is because they have been trying for years beforehand and it then takes another couple of years to access NHS IVF.

My DB and DSIL started trying in their 20s but eventually became “older parents” with NHS IVF. They each pay more than enough in tax to cover their whole lifetime allowance of IVF cycles every year and then some, which probably wouldn’t have been the case had they been teen parents. They have also been paying in for many years.

My school friends who had children as teenagers usually have subsidised housing, housing benefit, universal credit, free prescriptions, no council tax etc. etc. and still haven’t paid a penny in income tax even now we are pushing 30. Three that I know well got semi-detached houses with gardens handed to them when they were basically kids themselves and hadn’t worked a day in their lives.

I don’t know any IVF parents who make a particular issue of teen parents living on their tax money but I don’t think it would be hypocritical if they did.

I think it’s pretty clear. If you can’t distinguish between illness/injury (whether life threatening or not) which is the purpose of the NHS, and providing funding for someone’s desire for a child then that’s fine.

Comparing chemo for a cancer patient to IVF for someone who can’t have a child is excessive

Nobody is getting "multiple" IVF cycles on the NHS, don't know where you've made that up from. One most likely, two if you're lucky.

yes but some people need IVF because they need chemo. They shouldn’t have IVF as part of their cancer treatment package if they recover because why?

The NHS funds all sorts of treatments which are not life saving, and are “nice to have”, because good health and wellbeing is not simply the absence of disease and injury. It’s weird to pick out IVF to bin off when it’s such a minute part of NHS spending and the loss of the chance to have a child due to health reasons has such a profound impact on those that experience it.

The pp had an illness, one of the long term consequences of which is infertility. Do you think only some consequences of illness should warrant treatment? That’s fair enough if you do, but just be clear.

This is such a truly horrible thing to say - ‘if it isn’t happening naturally there is probably a good reason’

I had NHS IVF ICSI in my twenties due to medical issues both sides. It was cheaper for the NHS to give us a cycle than the surgery to fix my medical condition. We then self funded a second round, (by a clinic who wouldn’t have taken us if not for our successful NHS round as on paper we were highly unlikely to be successful, and the private clinics care about their stats), then we won the fertility lottery and our third was conceived naturally.

Three beautiful, incredibly intelligent and tall (ie not genetically ‘defective’) children. No difference between the IVF and natural conception. We have had 25 years of unprotected sex and his is the only natural conception.

The reason we couldn’t have kids naturally was due to a medical defect (me) and childhood cancer (him) which brought our combined likelihood of natural concept to almost nil. There is no ‘higher’ reason.

To the OP: I know plenty of people who have had IVF. I don’t know anyone other than me who had NHS cycles. Most of the women I know were in their late twenties and early thirties. I know only one person who was 40 and she self funded from an inheritance, having been previously unable to afford it (she spent her ten year marriage trying naturally, undergoing tests, trying and failing to qualify for NHS cycles, trying to save for private cycles, then her marriage breaking down which she attributes to the stress of the years of infertility). She had four goes in a year as she was racing the biological clock. She was fourth time lucky :)

No, I am fine with paying for them myself. I'm not clinically obese. It would be wrong to get the NHS to pay for treatment that is medically unnecessary. Just like it's wrong for IVF for women who just left it too late to have a baby.

I thought it was very limited for older Mums (i.e one cycle of IVF) and friends who have been through it all seem to have given up with NHS and gone private anyway.

As already said in the comments, there will be alot of people who start trying when they meet their partner (say thats early/mid 30’s) and try for years before IVF.

I think it would be fairly unusual for a couole to meet in their 20’s and not start trying until late 30’s/40’s for a baby. I imagine the majority of people trying at that age have met their partner later on or already had years of stress trying for a baby.

And when is too late? Bearing in mind we see stories from around the world of women nearly 50 having babies, conceived naturally?

When is it "just too late" and not something affected by something medical? And who gets to decide that?

Its exactly the same as needing help to lose weight. You don't need that help, good for you, you're paying for them for vanity reasons. Great. Having a family is not something people do for vanity.

I think in all honesty op, that is probably quite a niche group. I'm sorry if you have come up against some of them though.

My personal opinion is that things like IVF, which are not medical in the fact they treat a disease, should not be given on the NHS until the NHS has been sorted out.