In Vitro Fertility Goddess

Jill Singer: Why IVF’s Good for Society

The following article is in response to Jill Singer's column where she argues that government funding for IVF is wrong because it "means that we are paying to create a faulty gene pool, turning Darwin's theory about survival of the fittest on its head. What other species would be so foolish as to encourage this form of un-natural selection?" 

I suggest you read Jill Singer's article 'The IVF Revolution is money badly spent' first here » before reading my response below.

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Why IVF is Good for Society

by Jodi Panayotov 

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My goodness it must be pick on the Infertile month. Why else would a writer such as Jill Singer (clearly a fertility goddess) feel the need to write an article pointing out the evils of IVF treatment and the devil spawn it produces?  Well why not, after all taxpayers are subsidising, shock, horror! taxpayers who dearly want children more than anything but have fertility issues that require treatment and this costs money. If they are lucky after spending truckloads of their own money as well, they will eventually have children who will find themselves in loving stable homes with parents who went to great lengths to have them. And that's something that should clearly not be encouraged; in the long term we may have to close ever growing departments such as DOCS if such an outrageous waste of taxpayer funds keeps occurring.

The argument put forth by Jill is that we are subsidising the creation of 11000 much wanted children a year, which considering the amount of IVF cycles undertaken is a poor return on the outley. Yet the only way we are going to improve the return is to maintain or increase funding for infertility, not cut it. It is thanks to the large amounts of money that over the years have gone into the infertility industry, plenty of it out of the pockets of the infertile, that  the ‘returns' have improved greatly and, for instance, we now have a situation where in most cases one embryo is implanted.

She also feels that we should slash funding because a higher percentage of babies born to infertile couples are premature and therefore have the associated medical and health costs. Yet these figures surely are skewed by the fact that a lot of infertility treatment occurs in women who are over thirty-five who, due to age and regardless of treatment are more prone to premature and multiple births. And although premature babies do have catch up to play, by the time they are seven the majority have reached normal levels of development.

But the suggestion that almost had me biting off my arm at the elbow was that IVF is a form of ‘unnatural selection', before going on to ask ‘what society is stupid enough to promote the survival of the unfittest?'

Well we as a society have already been doing just that since the Whitlam introduction of the welfare state thirty five years ago. Like IVF it was something born out of the best of intentions. Yet nobody walks into one of the burgeoning numbers of impoverished third generation welfare dependent suburbs with high rates of crime, unemployment, substance abuse and single parenthood and goes, ‘Right, we the taxpayer are sick of subsidising you lot to keep popping out flawed children every year and neglecting them. We will therefore be limiting the number of children we will support. If you are a real no-hoper we may cut reproduction funding altogether and it will be entirely up to you to pay for them. Sorry while we love your children we are finding that the cost to the taxpayer is far too high in terms of what we get in return: drug addicted and foetal alcohol syndrome babies, the bulk of the country's foster children, dole youths, prison inmates etc. It goes against both Darwin's theories and tax reform and it needs to stop.'

Oh and Jill, whilst on the topic of neglected and abused huge-cost-to-taxpayer children, at last count what percentage of the tens of thousands of children currently in foster care (cost per child of up to a million dollars a year) are IVF children?

But I digress. You see I thought I should confess that I am the older mother of an IVF child. Like some I had a troubled pregnancy during which I was on bed rest for much of it and even had an emergency four day stay in hospital not to mention a wicked caesarean birth. Yes I can see the dollar signs starting to blind you but hey I did have private cover as do a large percentage of infertile women.

And my goodness but if the result of all this, my beautiful kind loving daughter didn't top her class last year, with a parting comment from her teacher, ‘If every student was like her the world would be a much better place.'

I'm sure that my daughter, like the three quarters of children who didn't require ‘expensive tax payer funded neonatal care' will have repaid the few thousand dollars of tax payer money that contributed to her creation a thousand fold in her life, if that is Jill's criteria for the outcome we should expect from taxpayer-funded conception. And for the children who require ongoing care, I'm also sure that with further input and the dedication of a parent who put themselves through hell and high water to have them, the majority will also grow up to be a happy functioning member of society. After all how do we measure worthiness and put a price on a member of society?

At the very least these children are deeply loved and as all studies have shown, being loved and cared for is the most important ingredient creating a well-adjusted happy human being.

If this is unnatural selection surely we need more of it. 

Jodi Panayotov