Disgusted with IVF Charging.

[POP2005]

My wife and I have been trying for a baby for around 3 years, at the moment she is taking Clomid to assist with Ovulation.

We are hopeful that the Clomid will be a sucsess, but we have been exploring all avenues. I stumbled across the HFEA website that lists all assisted conception units in the UK and I was shocked to see the NHS charging first time patients for IVF treatments.

Searching for some kind of campaign on the net was fruitless but through search engines I found many discussions on the matter and I was shocked to see the amount of hatred people have been spouting on various discussion boards about the cost of providing free IVF on the NHS for childless couples, they estimate the cost at £400m.

£1,500 seems to be the average cost (not including drugs) and for a childless couple, intially, this is a small price to pay as we are desperate to be parents but where does it stop?

I have even seen adverts from loan shaks offering IVF loans to desperate couples.

We could end up in extreme debt and still have no baby at the end of it.

Yet if I was to drink myself into oblivion and screw up my liver the treatment and operation would be free, hell, if I decided to have my gender "reassigned" I could even get a free sex-swap op on the NHS, smokers are offered free cessation assistance on the NHS and we all know that cancer treatments for smokers are also free.

Infertility in most cases is not self inflicted yet couples are forced into debt to pay for treatments - people who have made themselves ill through stupidity are treated free.

The estimated £400m cost is a small price for the goverment as IVF children grow up to be taxpayers.

Its time to End the postcode lottery now.

In some clinics the success rate for IVF per cycle is one in three! Mind you, some clinics don't take people they think it won't work for easily (eg those in late 30s plus) so as to boost their published success rate. High success rates don't always mean better treatment, just as the success rates of top selective schools reflects as much on the intake as the teaching. Mind you, IVF is getting much more successful and the techniques are being refined the whole time.

I think that besides the monetary cost issue of IVF there is also a health cost. Regardless of whether it was free or not I wouldn't consider having IVF on the NHS because their success rates are generally very low and it's not worth the risk to my health for such a low chance of success. In a big organisation like that it's very process focussed rather than individual focussed, which works well for things like broken legs which are generally very similar to each other, but not necessarily for fertility treatment where there are so many different causes of infertility and you can have such diverse reactions to the drugs used.

Good point really-0 and ties in with my experience. Complex case? NHS? forget it - whatever it is.

Good point bran I mean don't know what happened there.

I must go to bed.....

I wouldn't trust the NHS . We were on a waiting list for 18 months to have IVF and one day we got a letter to say that they had put us on the wrong list. We are now waiting on a private list for donor ivf and the list is 20 months as there is a lack of donors. Have you thought about a egg share programe? they do this at the Lister hospital in London.

This is a tricky one but, as a broad principle, I err towards the belief that no elective procedures should be funded on the NHS, without very strong clinical rationale underpinning them. And I also appreciate the argument regarding medical treatment being offered free to those who blatantly abuse their bodies - but admit that policing any control around that issue would be extremely hard & liable to slip into judgementality, based on 'in vogue' political correctness. Regarding IVF & other fertility treatments specifically, I fully appreciate that there are huge biological, emotional, social & other impetus to have children. But we also have to accept that the world is becoming grossly overpopulated & this has serious negative impacts on the planet, on natural resources, on social intrastructures etc. Difficult to achieve a balance here but I think we need to shift society away from the perception that having children is a 'right' and move to a position where it is viewed as a privilege. And, yes, I do realise that I am about to get swamped in a mass of diatribes, as this is a highly emotive issue. Yikes!!

Fair dos, thanks for pointing out!! Bit new to this online dialogue stuff. My bad.