Recently, I was at a party in Cambridge and met a girl who had just moved over from the US to start her PhD, researching the impact of IVF. I quickly volunteered that I was in fact an IVF baby. I also volunteered that I disagreed with IVF. She was shocked; it seemed she had never encountered this view before, let alone from a “beneficiary” of the treatment. I explained that I had significant moral and ethical qualms with IVF and found it to be an emotionally difficult fact about myself. I also explained that I had a significant number of health issues which I can’t help but attribute to my method of conception. She was deeply perturbed by my views and immediately begged the question: “but what about queer couples”. I looked at her blankly and laughed. I told her I didn’t care. “But they have a right to have children”, she replied. I told her I disagreed. No one has a right to have children. In my view, the only right around conception is the right of the child: to be well looked after and prioritised above the adults around them. But for proponents of IVF, that doesn’t seem to factor into the equation. In fact, the whole premise of IVF is the reverse; it is the adult’s wants (not needs), that are the sole decision-making factor in this process and viewed as the only ethical consideration. I explained how, in my view, the idea that anyone has a right to a child is immediately a false start from which to approach the issue of fertility. It is this false start that provides a market for IVF. When we strip it back, IVF is nothing more than a symptom of a capitalist desire-based culture which turns everything, including human life, into a commodity and views it as something we are entitled to, and like the newest iPhone or car model, should be able to purchase if we can afford it. It is the belief that we are entitled to have our individual wants met above all else. Needless to say, she quickly stopped talking to me.
As the recent film, Joy, makes clear, IVF is an incredibly new technology in the world’s history; the first IVF baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born on 25 July 1978. Before then, if a woman was infertile, that was that. This was a simple fact of biology — in the same way that it was a fact of biology that if you could not find a partner to conceive a child with you through sexual intercourse, you would not be having one. I simply do not see this as a social injustice. Stonewall’s claim that “everyone deserves the chance to start a family, no matter their sexuality or gender identity” is not an objective one, when IVF is positioned as the solution. It also eclipses the reality of IVF and/or surrogacy (difficult, arduous, ethically fraught, and often unsuccessful), and the other options available for same-sex couples. Of course, I don’t think that same-sex couples should be discriminated against in terms of accessing IVF. If it is available, they should face no more barriers to accessing it than any other section of the population. My point here is that there is a moral ambivalence in it being available to anyone at all. Arguing that it is no one’s right to have a child is not an attempt to persecute any section of society. As I see it, if you’re infertile (no matter why) you’ve simply pulled the short straw of the genetic lottery. It is a personally sad event (if you had desired a biological child), but there are lots of things in this life we want but don’t get. The fact is we are dealt certain hands, and if yours is infertility or involuntary childlessness, then, until 40-odd years ago, that was something you had to reconcile yourself to. And for many people, it still is.
Being conceived in a test tube, rather than my mother’s uterus, is spiritually unmooring
What the girl at the party, and what most of the discourse around the “right to a child”, forgets, is that the extension of this “right” still only applies to a slither of our society — those of the middle-upper class who can afford to pay for it. It is incredibly an out of touch view to hold that IVF can make fertility universally accessible. That is, I suppose, what charities like Stonewall want to correct. But even for those who can access it, there is still something of a mis-sold dream at the bottom of IVF — the highest rate of success is for women under 35, and even that only comes in at 32 per cent, according to the NHS. IVF is a gruelling process for women, with significant risks even in the event of conception. These statistics, to me, don’t seem to stack up against the cost of treatment (a single cycle costs around £5000 in the UK, excluding fertility assessments, initial consultations, or embryo freezing, and goes up and beyond of £10,000 for multi-cycle packages and egg freezing) and the ethical implications of the procedure. It’s the same with the rhetoric around egg-freezing (“Freeze your eggs now and deal with that later, you can have everything you want!”). IVF is not a catch-all solution to infertility, whether circumstantial or medical, and you’re a victim of false advertising if you believe that it is.
The lack of awareness of IVF’s success rates, and novelty as a technology, is alarming. IVF is deemed “successful” once a child has been born apparently healthy. The child and its family are then ejected back into the “real” world of standard healthcare and treated like the rest of the naturally conceived population. We are forgotten about. This plays out in the lack of adequate research into the long term effects of IVF, which, to my mind, is remarkable and simply brings home the experimentalism of this technology, which is nonetheless viewed as long established and is widely accepted as a moral and scientific good by society. I had repeated illnesses as a child which have continued into my adult life and I have struggled with depressive episodes since a young age. Interestingly, the correlation between ART and mental illness is among the few that have been noted in medical studies (see here). My GP once joked that I really get my money’s worth out of the NHS, but no one has ever even thought to explore a link between my ill health and method of conception. To be clear, I have no scientific evidence for making this link, only my own experience. Yet I can’t help but think that one day, my gut instinct about the health impacts of IVF will be born out and that we might be forced to reevaluate the blanket “goodness” we apply to this technology.
But we do not need to wait to understand the emotional side effects of IVF. The truth is that I am deeply uncomfortable with the fact that I was conceived through IVF. I wish I wasn’t, and that I had been conceived naturally. Being conceived in a test tube, rather than my mother’s uterus, is spiritually unmooring. I, quite clearly, was not meant to be born and many of my IVF friends feel the same. My ontological significance is completely different to the rest of my peers. It manifests in that old stereotype, “you were really wanted”. This is not a compliment. I think there is an understandable lack of comprehension among naturally conceived adults here.
Society seems ready and willing to consider the emotional side effects for the parents engaging in IVF, but it has yet to face up to the emotional side effects of IVF for the children conceived through it, which I imagine are violently unpalatable to the parents benefiting from this technology. It is also unpalatable to the companies profiting from parents’ misfortune and to the cultural zeitgeist which has co-opted IVF as a gay rights’ issue, rather than a child’s rights issue.
I am not deaf to the weight of the pain that leads parents to embark upon IVF. I get it, and I don’t condemn them for it. But I do condemn them for only listening to the positives this technology brings and refusing to have honest conversations about the ethical impacts upon the children involved.
I think my conception is a case in point. My parents got what they wanted, and they didn’t think about what it might do to me. They paid a heavy price for me (literally), and despite the joy surrounding my birth, they divorced when I was five years old. My parents were incompatible as people, and there’s a dark humour in the fact that their bodies seemed to know this long before they did. There’s some truth in the saying, “the body keeps the score”. And I can’t help thinking that it is my body keeping this score.
