IVF mania: Make me a baby

IVF mania: Make me a baby

image.jpgOld, young, single, gay - almost anybody can now have IVF if their pockets are deep enough. We have all gone procreation mad.

Earlier this month, Neil and Monique Ward hit the headlines for their unstinting determination to conceive. It took them 25 years, 21 attempts, two donated eggs and a staggering £100,000 to secure at last their elusive goal and become the proud parents of twin boys. Unusually, in the recent run of news and outrage about elderly patients seeking IVF, they are a mere 56 and 46 years old respectively. “Every failed attempt was like going through a divorce,” Neil says. “But Monique kept seeing all these film stars in their forties having babies, and she’d say, ‘If these people can do it, why can’t I?’ So we took on a mortgage, sold a few things, borrowed money from Monique’s father. In the end, it’s only money, isn’t it?”

Nowadays, pretty much anyone, whatever their circumstances, can reasonably hope to conceive if their pockets are deep enough, and at times it seems that we are in the grip of procreation fever. You may be a woman in your sixties or even seventies, but you, too, can now have a child. Single or gay? No problem. Last November was the first time the multi-million-pound IVF industry displayed the full array of its wizardry under one roof. Visitors to the Fertility Show at Olympia, in London, had only to glance around the vast number of diverse stalls to see that having a baby has never been so readily available to such a wide demographic, nor so fraught with moral complexity. You want to choose the gender? There’s a clinic that can fix it. Or to screen out any genetic abnormalities? Somewhere out there is the embryologist for you. Looking to rent a womb? Why don’t you outsource to India, where it’s rapidly becoming a popular way of escaping poverty for women of child-bearing age. You can choose an egg donor who’s a graduate of Yale; or find a sperm donor for their eye colour and have the sperm shipped directly to you through the post.

Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow, the gay millionaires who bypassed UK laws when they paid an American surrogate to carry their twins, first highlighted this growing new social trend a decade ago, when they became the first same-sex British couple to register as joint parents on a birth certificate. There’s now even a term for a child born to a couple like Barrie and Tony: gayby

Read more:www.timesonline.co.uk

Posted: 01/02/2010 07:43:39



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