IVF on the NHS has been a controversial topic since it started being offered as a treatment option. For some people, the NHS should provide emergency care, not life improving services.
For others, the right to have a child is just that - a right.
The debate would be much simpler if it wasn't for the fact that NHS is really, really expensive. The cost varies depending on where you live, but you're looking at around £5,000 per cycle. Which makes it prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, especially people who want to have more than one child or who need more than one cycle to conceive.
Unfortunately, it's also an expensive service for the NHS to offer, and because it isn't a life or death treatment, it's considered to be non essential. So when hospitals need to cut costs, withdrawing the option for free IVF is a tempting place to start.
To that end, in some areas of the UK, the NHS will not fund IVF for single women, because of the 'known disadvantage that providing assisted conception to a single woman would cause both the child and the mother, funding of assisted conception for single women is not available in SE London'.
That doesn't explain why NHS South East London have decided to stop offering IVF to single women rather than women who are in relationships. But unfortunately the patchy and inconsistent rules about IVF mean that what kind of treatment you get pretty much depends on how lucky you are.
In some parts of the UK, you're not eligible for anyIVF if your partner has had a child with another woman. In others you can have three cycles, regardless of whether your other half has previous children.
Similarly, there are areas where you get one go, two goes and three goes. In Croydon, you get none, regardless of your status.
The official party line from the NHS goes like this: 'According to NICE, women aged under 40 should be offered 3 cycles of IVF treatment on the NHS if:
If you turn 40 during treatment, the current cycle will be completed, but further cycles shouldn't be offered.'
The NHS then go on to say that you can still be eligible between the ages of 40 and 42, but only if the doctors think you've got a strong chance of conceiving. They also acknowledge that there are other factors upon which CCG (clinical commissioning group, who make the choice about who to offer treatment to).
Those factors include not having any previous children between you, being a non smoker, being a 'healthy' weight, or being under 35.
The NHS's choice to not offer IVF to certain groups of women can feel like a form of judgement. Should overweight women really be denied the chance to get pregnant, when many women with high BMIs do so naturally?
Should waiting until you're in your late thirties to start trying be penalised?
Should social infertility - when women are childless because they haven't met anyone to have kids with - be punished?
One side of the argument says that it's essential to draw a line because the NHS cannot afford infinite IVF for everyone who needs it. But the other side of the argument says that it's very hard to accept that when you're standing, desperate to become a parent, on the other side of that line.
Whatever the rights and wrongs are of free IVF on the NHS, we can all agree that it doesn't make sense for it to be offered as a random postcode lottery, with people living on different streets in the same town being offered completely different levels of support.