Page 36 Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 27, 2019

L

aura Slattery was just 19

when she was first referred for IVF

after trying to get pregnant for a

year. ‘We were told the tests

showed I had poor-quality eggs

and that my fiance Daniel had a low

sperm count,’ she says.
laura underwent two NHS-funded attempts
at IVF, using a technique called intracytoplas-
mic sperm injection (ICSI), where a single
sperm was injected into one of laura’s eggs.
Both attempts resulted in failure.
‘Our wedding was coming up so we decided to
give the treatment a break,’ says laura, from
Hertford Heath in Hertfordshire. at the time
she was 20 and Daniel (now her husband, who
works for a pharmaceutical company), was 23.
two months after the wedding, she found she
was pregnant naturally.
Indeed, in the intervening decade she has
produced no fewer than eight children with her
‘poor-quality eggs’. Her eldest daughter Bella is
now eight. Her second baby Zack, now six,
followed two years later, and since then she has
donated ‘quality’ eggs that have been used in
IVF procedures for other women and created a
further six babies.
‘Once I had Zack I wanted to give something
back because I know how it feels to be in that
situation of desperately wanting a baby and
not being able to have one,’ says laura, who
is now 30.
She says part of the problem was her ‘very
irregular’ periods — ‘sometimes they were two
or four months apart,’ she says. ‘I had two tests
for polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes
hormonal abnormalities. the first one showed
I had it and the second showed I didn’t.
‘I don’t feel I was misled about my infertility
because I saw the results of the tests myself,’
says laura. ‘But I think I should have been
offered ovulation stimulation drugs first. It’s
surely better to begin with a cheaper alterna-
tive than to start straight away with ICSI.’
Her experience is hardly unusual, with a major
new study finding that as many as one woman
in six who was unsuccessful with IVF went on
to conceive naturally. this follows previous
research in 2016 which suggested that one
woman in three conceived naturally after
stopping fertility treatment.
research and stories such as laura’s raise the
question of how infertility can be so
comprehensively misdiagnosed — an issue that
is only going to become more pressing as
demand for IVF grows.
although NHS budgets for infertility treat-
ment are being reduced every year, providing it
still costs taxpayers £68 million a year, accord-
ing to a report published in the BMJ last year.
the Human Fertilisation and embryology
authority, which regulates the sector, estimates
a further £320 million a year is being spent on
private treatment by desperate childless couples,
and the industry is growing at 3 per cent a year.

YOUNGER COUPLES ‘HELP

BOOST IVF SUCCESS RATE’

ONe IVF attempt can cost the taxpayer £5,000,
while couples paying for their own treatment
can pay up to double that amount.
But how much money is being wasted on
treatment for those who could conceive
naturally — especially on young couples who,
some experts suggest, may be channelled into
fertility clinics in order to improve their
published success rates?
this comes as demand for IVF has been
further boosted by changes in the definition of
infertility, which the World Health Organisation
now classes as a disease in which there is failure
to achieve pregnancy after a year of unprotected
sexual intercourse.
a spokesman for the National Institute for
Health and Care excellence (NICe) said
couples should try to get pregnant naturally

SPECIAL

REPORT

By LOIS ROGERS

for two years before seeking

treatment. But NICe’s own fertil-

ity assessment and treatment

guidelines are ambiguous.

the 51-page document says in

some places that treatment should

be offered after 12 months of infer-

tility, but elsewhere it suggests

women should wait two years.

‘Clinics are treating young fertile

women in haste because it is their

only chance to inflate their success

rates,’ says Gulam Bahadur, a

consultant clinical andrologist

[male fertility specialist] at North

Middlesex university Hospital,

london, and a longstanding critic

of the fertility industry. He points

to other studies showing that

artificial insemination — the

‘turkey baster’ approach — often

matches IVF success rates for

appropriately selected women.

‘It would save a huge chunk of

government money if all women

had to wait two years before they

could have NHS IVF treatment,’

he adds, ‘and it obviously benefits

patients and their children for

babies to be born naturally.’

the controversy has been fuelled

by the first large-scale study in

Britain to look at fertility patients in

the five years following treatment.

the study, published in July in the

journal Human reproduction,

found that 185 of 1,073 women who

did not get pregnant using IVF

(17.2 per cent) went on to have a

baby naturally.

Furthermore, 151 of the 1,060 who

did have a baby with IVF (14.2 per

IVF!

Remarkably, one in six couples who

have fertility treatment at vast

personal cost go on to conceive

naturally. Now meet the families

who did just that — and say...

We’re

glorious

proof

you DON’T

always need