Could you ask strangers for money to pay for IVF?

It may sound incredible, but apparently people are having to come up with ever more inventive ways to fund their fertility treatment in the current economic situation.  With many couples already living on overdrafts, cutting back on holidays or other luxuries will not free up the ready cash needed, and getting loans or using already overloaded credit cards is becoming increasingly difficult. So, in the States at least, some couples have apparently turned to the internet using websites or Facebook to ask strangers for money to fund their treatment – see this article.  Could you consider this? Should you have to?

Here in the UK, the postcode lottery for treatment continues to cause distress to many couples who find they can’t access IVF despite being eligible according to the national guidelines because in their local area the primary care trust has decided not to fund treatment – or to ration it.  It can be very difficult to find the money for private treatment which will cost more than the NHS would pay.  Lord Winston campaigned on this some time ago – saying that many clinics were hugely overcharging for fertility treatment and that it could be far cheaper.

Asking strangers for money may seem extreme, but does perhaps illustrate how difficult it can be to live with involuntary childlessness…

Another trust cuts fertility funding

So, now NHS Bury has decided to stop funding IVF too - apparently as part of a plan to save "millions of pounds". Well, I just hope the plan includes an awful lot of other things, as they're not going to save a single million by stopping fertility treatment.

In 2008, they funded a total of 31 treatment cycles - which means they'd probably struggle to save much more than £100,000 by cutting treatment altogether. That may seem quite a lot of money but in terms of their multi-million pound annual budget, it is peanuts. I suspect the board at NHS Bury could do with a few lessons in health economics - causing so much misery and depression for such a small saving is not good policy, it's a lazy way to make it look as if you are doing something by snipping away at small budgets,

IVF is not always successful, but the pain of involuntary childlessness is far easier to bear if you know that you had the opportunity to try to overcome your fertility problem. And let's be clear, a fertility problem is a health problem not a "lifestyle issue". I am never entirely sure why blocked Fallopian tubes or polycystic ovary syndrome are conveniently no longer classified as medical problems when it comes to funding fertility.

NHS Bury is also cutting "other discretionary procedures" such as cosmetic surgery, apart from in exceptional cases (which suggests a lot of unexceptional ones have been funded in the past) and homeopathy treatments. Says it all really...