We're still trailing behind when it comes to IVF

Anyone who has any personal experience of IVF will know that our funding situation in the UK is patchy at best, but the report released from ESHRE this week showing quite how badly we're trailing behind our European neighbours was still something of a shock. We came third from the bottom in a European table for funding fertility treatment, with only Russia and Ireland behind us. Belgium and Denmark both fund around three times as much treatment per million inhabitants as we do.  Even Slovenia funds twice as much.

I've just been on Radio Humberside discussing the situation, and the presenter seemed not to have considered that infertility might be a medical condition. It always strikes me as odd that if it's your fallopian tubes or your ovaries that don't work, a medical problem becomes  a "lifestyle choice".  Where do we draw the line with "lifestyle choices" and medical treatment? Infertility is not going to kill anyone, people often say. No, it probably isn't, but surely the NHS wasn't set up only to treat people who would drop dead if they weren't helped right away?  Even funding three full cycles of IVF for all those who needed it would be a tiny drop in NHS budgets - and cutting all IVF funding entirely wouldn't begin to solve our financial problems (indeed it could make them far worse, if more and more fertility patients started going overseas and coming back pregnant with triplets).

I think this debate is about something much more than infertility - although our attitudes to families and children in the UK probably provide an interesting tangential discussion. It seems to me that deciding that some medical conditions are unworthy of treatment is the tip of a very large iceberg which rests on our decisions about what the NHS is for. What other treatments might constitute "lifestyle choices"? Hip and knee replacements perhaps? Might people decide that they aren't entirely essential?  Perhaps being able to walk long distances without any pain is a "lifestyle choice" - you don't have to walk far, you can take painkillers.

Cutting IVF funding is easy - some people even think it's a good thing.  People with fertility problems are often so distressed that they haven't told their closest friends and family about what's happening to them.  They aren't going to be outside the local PCT waving banners and shouting.  Just because something is easy, that doesn't make it right - and being oblivious to the longer term consequences of short-term financial decisions seems to be all too common at the moment.