Same-sex couples, single women and low-income families would have cheaper access to fertility treatment under a new 10-year plan to address declining birth rates and regulate Australia’s booming IVF industry.
In a sweeping review of Australia’s national fertility policy, unveiled on Sunday, former health minister Greg Hunt and embryologist Dr Rachel Swift found the fragmented IVF system was not equipped to keep up with rising demand fuelled by older parents and more non-traditional families.
Another recommendation was to fund public patient IVF targeted at low and limited-income families, noting a single IVF cycle could cost upwards of $10,000.
The review will increase pressure on Hunt’s successor as federal health minister, Mark Butler, to update the Commonwealth’s definition of infertility after the authors found there was “near universal” community support for giving same-sex couples and single women equal access to Medicare-subsidised IVF.
The Commonwealth’s current definition of infertility restricts Medicare benefits to people unable to conceive after one year of regular, unprotected intercourse.
The Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, the peak body commissioning the review as part of its 10-year strategy, has described that definition as outdated and discriminatory, and last month joined other peak fertility organisations in updating their own definitions of infertility to better represent same-sex and solo parents.
The sector’s regulator, the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee (RTAC), is currently funded wholly by the Fertility Society. The review recommended the government chip in funding to address a perceived lack of independence and concerns about its “capacity to handle the anticipated growth in IVF services”.
The review’s key recommendation was to collapse more than 40 state and territory IVF-related laws into one uniform national law, guaranteeing equal reproductive rights nationwide and reducing red tape across borders.
This would enable governments to set up a single national health standard for egg and sperm donation, similar to that for organ and blood donation, which Hunt and Swift said would address a reported national shortage of donated eggs and sperm.
A national register and genetic bank was also recommended, to guarantee the rights of donor-conceived children to seek information about their genetic parentage and create uniform laws protecting the rights of donors.
Australia now has more than 300,000 children born through IVF, with 20,000 new IVF babies added each year.
[ED: So, the regulator is entirely funded by those who profit from the IVF industry. No conflict of interest there! And how is Hunt’s position as ‘Enterprise Professor’ being funded? Seems like the medico-pharmaceutical industry has government, the tertiary sector and media completely captured. There is a complete lack of balanced reporting in this article. Where are the voices of dissent about this proposed misdirection of public funds? The fact that increasing numbers of gay men want to have their own children does not constitute a fertility crisis. Where is the link to the report of this review so we can check the source for the claim of ‘near universal’ community support for this proposed change? ]
Source: 12ft
Once upon a time there was a society, ours, in which wages paid enough for one member of the partnership to go to paid work and the other member to not go to paid work but work at birthing and raising the family.
I know a heterosexual family may be problematic now but it seemed to work ok for most people.
And this society didn’t seem to have fertility problems because the people then seemed to be closer to nature and were knowledgable about fertility and the best age for becoming pregnant.
Now everyone wants a baby as a right, despite being at the very tail end of fertility age or despite both partners having the same genitalia.
I have a number of female friends who left fertility out of the equation until it was too late due to the allure of career’s etc. and are now childless.
Female fertility is only really about 20 years and the 20’s are the ideal age to reproduce. Male fertility is unfairly much longer in period.
It seems as though we cannot bring ourselves to realise how nature effects what we can and cannot do. And the more we push an ideological barrow in our ideals about fertility the more we will need to resort to the unenviable option of IVF with its 20% success rate (off the top of my head)…
And women’s ‘rights’ in all this? Where is the army of surrogates willing to produce a child for ‘right’ for every gay man to have a child?
And where are the sperm donors who want to help single or gay women have their right to a child?
And what are the social outcomes from the menagerie of childless people who see a baby as a right?
The traditional heterosexual family forces women into financial dependency on men rendering them vulnerable to domestic violence. I don’t agree that it ‘seemed to work OK for most people’ – perhaps most men. Perhaps if men would relinquish their control and recognise that women are entitled to their independence and to receive an adequate independent income when they are raising children, we wouldn’t have the problems you describe. Women would not feel obliged to delay child bearing until they have reached a certain level in their careers, if they didn’t harbour anxieties regarding their financial independence and their ability to raise a child without being subject to male coercion and control.