According to the Daily Mail headlines last week, it seems that couples are 'losing out' in the IVF lottery because single women are being given treatment above them. Just the sort of headlines to confirm the prejudices of those who think the NHS is funding far too much fertility treatment. Apparently, one in five primary care trusts will fund IVF for single women. In theory, at least... And that's where the argument starts to lose ground.
As anyone who has tried to access fertility treatment on the NHS knows, the funding situation is a bit of a mess. Although PCTs may say they would fund treatment for single women, the numbers of single women who've actually received NHS treatment is likely to be incredibly low. IVF is a treatment for those with fertility problems - single women trying to conceive wouldn't start out by opting for IVF as very few women know they have a problem before they start trying to get pregnant. And if a single woman has a fertility problem, should we really say we won't give the necessary treatment to get over a medical condition because she doesn't have a partner? Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of this, it doesn't alter the fact that the headlines were fundamentally inaccurate.
Reading the stories more closely, they'd carefully avoided any mention of how many single women had received NHS-funded IVF or how much this might have cost. Of course, the reality is that this is one of those occasions when the truth would have got in the way of a good story. Equally, there was no evidence to support the claim that these single women were being given preferential treatment over couples. A handful of single women having NHS-funded IVF hardly merits the headlines, and yet it's probably far closer to the real picture.
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