Today was mail day on The Current, so I listened to people rant on about the things they heard this week. Some mail was about a piece on fertility, centered around the 60-year-old woman who recently gave birth to twins. Some of the letters line up with my personal opinions - people over a certain age will find it difficult to raise young children because they don't have energy for it. One letter in particular noted that they were considered strange by other parents when they had a child in their 40's, but now it is far more common. I think it's not a great idea, personally. If having children is that important, why can't you sacrifice a little when you can handle things best. Put another way, you should have kids before you're old enough to realize how much work it is. The older the parents are when the process begins, the more likely they will have a single child that is coddled/treasured/bubbled. If it took until you were in your 50s before you could have a child, that represents a huge effort and you'd like to protect that effort. How will you ever be able to let go? How will you be able to give the child the distance to let them grown on their own? When you're younger, I think it is easier. Bill Cosby would say that when he got in trouble, his father would say "I brought you into this world, I can take you out. And don't think I won't because I make another just like you." Good detachment, little be too heavy on the discipline, but you get the idea.
That is only the warm-up rant on the assisted fertility topic however. The letter that got to me was from someone who pointed out that fertility treatments are a for-pay enterprise that costs a good deal of money. A single course of IVF (In-Vitro Fertilization) treatment costs about $10,000.00. The author of the letter thought that the government health plans should cover it, comparing this to knee replacement surgery. The comparison was "If someone can get a knee replaced so they can go running, I should be able to get IVF." That's paraphrased - I'm working from memory here. First of all, the analogy is very, very poor - it implies that a person selfishly gets knee replacement surgery to continue doing something that will damage their knee and IVF is less selfish and less burdensome on the healthcare system. Each successful IVF treatement brings additional load on the healthcare system - a new person. There are no guarantees that the treatment will work, so often several treatments are necessary to achieve a successful birth, another large load. The knee surgery person is hurting only themself. The next part of my argument is a not as fully worked out, so I apologize for any incoherency. Maybe there is a system reason why a particular couple can't conceive - systemic in the natural system sense. Maybe there is something about those two people, the time, the place etc that makes it impossible for them to conceive in the regular (fun?) fashion. Considering how important new life is to species, that says something. I don't mean that IVF technologies are inherently wrong and I don't believe that it is "fate". What I mean is that we do not know very much of how our bodies operate on the whole, so the living whole may be sensitive to things we don't currently understand or recognize now. What bothered me the most about this letter was not the suggestion that fertility issues should be covered by our Canadian public health care system, but the insistent tone of entitlement. The author implied their right to proper life were violated because the gov't won't pay for them to special treatments to conceive. Why do they need to have the same life as all their friends? Does their best friend having a child mean they need a child to complete them?
Now I'm getting petulant, so I'll move on. I can't know what motivates their need for a child, so I'll continue on and say that I think it would be a good idea for the public health care system to support fertility treatments in some way. An expert came on to help talk about the issues in the letter and he indicated that some treatments are covered by the system now, but IVF is not covered. He mentioned that some countries in Europe will cover IVF for the implantation of 1 embryo, and will not do it for women past a certain age. This tied back to the 60 year old woman who had IVF treatment and birthed twins - she had the treatment done in India. I think IVF should be covered, but it should be provided in a system like the organ doaner system - patients are triaged and served in the order of some list. Devising the rules for ranking of that list would be difficult. I would use age as a factor, but there is obviously more parameters to consider. However I don't think that the private option should be removed - if you have the money to pay for the treatments, have as many kids as you like. Obviously you have money to support all these treatments. Free-market thinking has huge holes, as octo-mom in California proved (my wife's term). The woman who recently gave birth to octuplets in California is single, no job, has several kids already but somehow afforded the treatments that resulted in the octuplets. Anyway, I suspect we'll find in the future that the natural methods are the best - most robust, safest, most reliable. We shall have to wait and see.
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