The first “IVF baby”, Louise Brown, will be 40 next year. A quarter of a million children have now been born as a result of in vitro fertilisation in Britain. Every baby is precious, and the parents of these children have endured arduous treatment and sometimes great financial sacrifice in order to have a family.
The situation is more complex than it first appears, however. Only a quarter of IVF treatments result in a baby. The odds are better than when IVF was introduced (when it was 15 per cent), but it still means that the vast majority of people who embark on this treatment are being offered false hope that they will be able to have their longed-for child. The irony is that IVF does not diagnose or treat the causes of infertility; it attempts to bypass them. Instead of trying to enable natural processes to work, IVF steamrollers them. Ovulation is first suppressed, then hyperstimulated.
Infertility is a terrible cross for people to bear, and the desire to have a child is completely natural, and understandably sometimes overwhelming. But IVF – alongside many other “reproductive health” techniques – subtly changes the status of the baby from a gift into a commodity. (I was born via donor conception myself – in vivo rather than in vitro – and have struggled to come to terms with this, particularly a sense of loss of identity and being cut off from one of my parents.)
When NHS treatment is not available, would-be parents are persuaded to pay thousands of pounds for the chance of a baby. But the technique does not just produce one baby: the explicit aim of the process is to produce multiple embryos, and choose the “best” one to transfer to the womb.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was prophetic. IVF intentionally produces multiple tiny human beings, then selects the one which appears “the best” and gives him or her a chance of life. Not only that, but certain countries allow gender selection via IVF, and also genetic screening – not just for serious illness but also for disorders of which the potential parents may simply be carriers.
What happens to the embryos who do not get implanted? Their parents have three choices. They can be frozen for up to five years, then they have to be either destroyed, donated anonymously to another woman or given to medical research. So in order to have a child, intended parents have to give up their children. In order to heal the pain of infertility, a very high price is demanded.
Indeed, IVF is big business. Each private cycle of IVF costs £5,000 or more, and many couples undergo multiple treatment cycles in the hope that they will eventually be successful. As well as the financial impact, there is a high price to pay for couples who use IVF unsuccessfully. Internet discussion boards are full of heart-rending posts by women. One talks of “the sheer futility and rawness of things not working”. Another writes: “I wish IVF had never been invented.”
There is an alternative. NaProTechnology is a holistic approach to investigating and treating the underlying causes of infertility, which is totally in line with Catholic teaching. It uses many different diagnostic techniques to identify the underlying causes of infertility, and its success rates are startling. Depending on the underlying cause of infertility, up to 80 per cent of patients manage to conceive naturally, compared to the 25 per cent typical success rate in IVF. There is no euphemistic “sperm collection”, no invasive artificial hormone treatment and egg collection, and no surplus embryos.
Unfortunately, there is very little money directed towards research into NaPro technology, because it is all funnelled into IVF, with the result that fertility-friendly techniques are not researched and doctors are losing the skills necessary for using methods which work to restore natural fertility. Let us hope that we do not have to wait another 40 years for this ethical alternative to IVF to be more widely available.
Elizabeth Howard worked in teaching and publishing before becoming a home educator
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